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> Results: Street Supremacy
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The subtitle of this review says it all. Street Supremacy for the PlayStation Portable is simply a renaming of an entry in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series, as it's known here in the West. It features a limited number of cars based on real models from the likes of Nissan, Mazda, Toyota, Honda and others as well as customization options and a pretty cool team battle mode that's the basis for most single-player action.
As a budding street racer, you fight against other racers at night on the highways around Tokyo. The goal is to win races, advance your standing within your team and eventually take over the top spot so you can direct how your team will attempt to rule the highways. This mode is nicely designed and syncs up well with the core racing. That core is different from every other racing game because each one on one match up is like a fighting game with cars. Your life bar goes down the longer you stay behind the car you're trying to beat. Get out in front and your opponent starts to lose life. When one of you loses the entire bar, the other guy wins. It's always been a cool twist to the racing genre and something that this series has ridden hard for years as its own unique gimmick.  Unfortunately, the entire thing is completely undermined by atrocious load times for, well, just about everything. You often spend less than a minute or two in a race. That's followed by an eternity of menu screens, loading and strategic management of your team. It's almost like the racing is an afterthought of the design. It's awful for a portable game because you never feel like you've done much of anything despite spending ten or twenty minutes at a time with the PSP powered up. Worse, the racing is afflicted by slowdown and a lack of any real traffic to avoid. It seems like the game can't draw more than three cars on the screen at once or the PSP will choke and die. It's easy to confirm how badly the cars affect the framerate because in Time Trial, things are nice and snappy. To add insult to injury, the controls are horribly unresponsive while racing anything but Time Trial, probably also due to the framerate problems. Local Multiplayer is included but apparently doesn't ever connect properly if you're lucky enough to find another person to try to play this game against. It's a very pretty game, even in the menu screens, with some flashy graphics to transition from menu to menu that incorporate a nifty LOADING animation. This attempt to disguise the amount of time you spend staring at a whole lot of nothing to do is admirable but shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The strategic possibilities of the Team Battle mode are certainly unique and a cool idea, but the execution is just so poor, and maybe not suited to the PSP in the first place. Don't get snookered by the pretty pictures. Street Supremacy doesn't live up to its title's claim.  
While the ESRB notes an alcohol reference, it's not exactly overt. Kids are likely to be the first ones to moan about the long loading times in this game. On the other hand, kids are also easily wowed by pretty graphics and often pretty forgiving of games that have them. There just isn't enough racing here to keep them interested, though. Too much time is spent buying parts for little on-track car improvement and even more is spent waiting for something to do.
There are much better options for racing fans on PSP. Ridge Racer or Wipeout Pure are easily better choices. If street racing is a must, Electronic Arts has you covered a little better with Need for Speed: Most Wanted.5-1-0 or the older Underground Rivals. Any of those would be better for kids with a speed fetish. Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "psp street supremacy" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Street Supremacy |
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