Prepare to scoff: this is my favorite racing game series.

I am a pretty big racing game fan. I'm a car nut, so it's pretty logical to see the connection for me. I grew up playing the de facto racing game series, Gran Turismo. The first racing game I actively recall playing first was Pole Position, but this post isn't about either of those games. No, this post is about Shutokou Battle, also known as Tokyo Xtreme Racer here in the United States.

These are the Shutokou Battle games I own.

The first time I saw this game, it was the Dreamcast version and it was at Funcoland. Not Gamestop, but the predecessor to Gamestop. I only saw about 30 seconds of racing, but minutes of some kid assembling his license plate on a Honda Civic. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Mind you I was like 15.

Anyway, a few years later I happened across a copy of Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero for the PS2, which would be my first foray into the franchise. I was lured in by the box art and images on the back of the box...it looked sweet as shit. I purchased it for paltry sum of forty-five doll hairs, and took it home to my PS2. I shortly became addicted to the game, as it had the perfect combination of shit I liked and they were all in the same proportions.

TXR is a pretty simple game. You are a street racer in Japan, racing on the freeways known as the Wangan. Unlike most games where you choose a track and then go race people for a few laps, this game functions completely differently. When you get ready to race, you select an on-ramp to the freeway and select a direction you wish to head (east/west, north/south, etc.). You then just get plopped out onto the freeway to find your rivals.

When you hit the mean streets of Japan, you will begin you search for people to challenge. The "enemies" in the game are denoted with a huge ass arrow above their car, and to challenge them you flash your headlights to begin the race. If you are eligible to race them, there is a quick countdown and you begin the race. The duration of the race is dependent on the Spirit Gauge at the top of the screen, which is pretty much your health bar. If you are behind your opponent you lose Spirit, get too far behind and it depletes even faster. If you are ahead of your opponent, their gauge drops. Whoever loses all their Spirit first loses. I think hitting walls also depletes your SP as well. I think it's actually referred to as something else, but I've always called it Spirit.

The coolest part of the game, however, is the customization. TXR lets you fully customize your cars, both mechanically and visually. They have a whole slew of body parts, wheels and other bits to keep your busy for a long while. You also have the option of adding custom paint jobs to them as well. The earlier games sport a huge list of cars, where the newest version of the 360 has a truncated list. Either way, you'll have tons of fun racing these things around and making them look like giant toys. Super fun.

The little bars at the top of the screen are your "health."

After I got hooked on Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero, I wouldn't give it up until I beat every person in the game. The Wangan is home to a whole shitload of racing gangs you have to beat. Each gang is about 5 or 6 cars, with a boss after you've beaten the lower level dudes. The bosses are always cheap assholes who are about 10x faster than their counterparts, so watch out for that shit. Aside from the gang bosses, there is a gang of bosses like the 12 devils or something, all of which are douches. ASIDE FROM THAT GANG there are a whole slew of "wanderers" who are drivers that aren't from the area who wander the freeway. These are special racers that require you to meet certain criteria to face (like have 12 cars in your garage, have 100,000 credits, etc.) or only appear at certain places and times. Once you beat all of these people, which is 399 racers, you get to face the ultimate boss who is absurdly fast and ultra cheap.

I vividly remember beating him back in college, it was around this time 10 years ago. I tried for a few days to beat this bastard, but he was way too fucking fast. I was using a super-duper-deluxe 1000+ hp Skyline that could do over 200mph and it still wasn't fast enough to beat the last boss on the straights. I then decided to follow him until the curvy bits of the road to challenge him, and he'd still beat my ass. So after trying for hours, I finally got him on a curvy bit and got him to this giant loop in the south-western corner of the expressway. He was directly behind me as we went around the loop, dodging in and out of cars. There was a big truck changing lanes to the right, and I took the opportunity to pass him on the right in the emergency lane. The boss guy ran smack dab into the back of the truck and spun out. I saw this happen in the rear-view mirror and just hauled ass. Luckily for me, he never got back up close enough to pass me and I finally beat him. I jumped out of my chair, screamed and ran around the house screaming "I BEAT HIM! I DID IT! I BEAT HIM!"

I don't really know how many hours I put into TXRZ, but it was a shitload. I started searching out other TXR games, and found out it was called something else in Japan (like almost every other game, ever). In Japan it's called Shutokou Battle. I was always checking for news and updates on Shutokou Battle in Japan, because TXR was basically a budget brand here in the states and nobody gave a rats ass about it. When Shutokou Battle Zero-One came out, I was all up in that bitch with my credit card ordering the game from Play-Asia. I paid $60 for the game, and it was released about 9 months later here in the states as Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 for $20 new. But I will say it was totally worth it.

Shutokou Battle Zero-One is pretty much the same exact game as TXRZ, but with updated graphics and a bunch of new cars. They also added two new freeways to explore, each one with their own gangs. The most annoying thing was the return of the Evo gang, who you had to race back to back and is always a bitch. The last boss was actually different in this version, but still a bitch. Overall, it was a great game and a worthy successor.

PSP version of the game.

A portable version of the game came out for the PSP about a year after that, a game I also imported as soon as I could. It functioned differently than the original series, as you didn't patrol the streets looking for races. You selected your opponents to race and then raced them. I never got far in this game, because unlike Shutokou Battle Zero-One which had easy to read menus, this one had a crapload of kanji that I never figured out. I couldn't understand what was happening in the game most of the time, so I sorta gave up. SB01 was pretty easy to decipher, as you only had to read the menus which were mostly in hiragana. I've been trying to track down the US version, which was called Street Supremacy.

Da fuq?

Import Tuner Challenge in action. Kinda.

A few years down the road, TXR was brought onto the current generation of consoles, this time sporting the name Import Tuner Challenge. The game was practically the same, except this time there were licensed cars and online play. The car list was a lot smaller this go-round, so you had to pretty much stick with a Legacy or Skyline to kick major ass. (Pro-tip: the Subaru Legacy must be the developers favorite cars because they are all ridiculously fast.) The online play was more annoying than it was worth. Instead of just throwing you out on an open road to race random people, you queued up with people for drag races on stretches of the road. If you were winning, more often than not your opponent would just lose and you'd get a draw. It was fucking annoying because you could seriously never win. Now nobody plays. Bummer.

There was an online version of the game in Japan, but you had to be Japanese to play it which was a bummer, because I would have liked to give it a whirl.

Kaido Battle 2. Shit's fun.

Since then there have only been two additional games in the franchise released in the US that aren't actually Shutokou Battle games. They are called Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift (and it's sequel which is just TXRD2) and are actually ports of Kaido Battle 1&2 which are made by Genki, who developed Shutokou Battle. I actually have Kaido Battle 2, and it's a fucking great game. Kaido Battle is a mountain racing game, both grip and drifting. It's focused more on the drift aspect than the grip, but they both have their place in the campaign mode. This game you select an opponent to race from a parking lot and then go to battle on the road. There are a bunch of different modes, and you practice during the day and race opponents at night. There is also a date mode where you try to woo girls with your Silvia, but I can't understand any of it in Japanese and I don't even think it's in the US version. It has the customization from SB/TXR, but looks better in my opinion. The car list for this game is also pretty huge, and they are licensed cars this time, as well.

TXR Drift / Kaido Battle!

It's sort of a shame that these games don't get more credit and are marketed so poorly here in the states. I think they are all pretty damn solid games, deserving of more plays from us doofuses here in the US. TXRZ seemed to be marketed on the back of Fast and the Furious, which seems like it was a movie licensed game, which simply isn't true. Every game since Zero on the PS2 has been released as a budget title in the states, which is good for us cheap-asses, but budget titles are frequently overlooked. It might not have the polish and name of Gran Turismo, but it's way more fun and I'd choose it over GT anyday.