Being home on lock down during this pandemic has highlighted something that I miss dearly…driving. I had a 45 minute commute to work, a 30 minute drive to the second job. In my area, everything is a 10 minute drive away or more. I love the feel of driving. I love listening to a podcast during my daily commute. Music sounds better in a moving car. The drive is my time to think and decompress and that’s gone.
Another part of driving I love is seeing the aesthetic of a wet car, and the lights reflecting in the rain. Just when you think a commute has become mundane somebody drives by in a Kia Stinger or a Mitsubishi Starion (somebody owns one in my area now…amazing) and it just brightens the entire day. These things are missing in my life in a big way now. I’ve been watching countless vintage motor trend reviews on YouTube and I can quote Doug Demuro on basically every quirky car in existence. All of this leads me to Tokyo Highway Battle. This is the first entry in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series and it’s an early PS1 masterpiece.
As much as I revere driving and cars, nothing compares to the reverence to automotive culture as Japanese video games in the mid to late ’90s. There is a love of the culture around the car that shines through more than even the obsession with horsepower and speed at the time. This love of cars boiled over to America in the form of the Fast and Furious series and my age-group’s obsession with Gran Turismo and the Japanese cars it exposed us to. A lot of games made it over here during this time, the best ones are not just racing simulators. Tokyo Highway Battle, much like later entries in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer Series, is a driving game disguised as a racing game.
Tokyo Highway Battle is a one on one street racing game, with arcade physics. You start the game with 3 cars and 3 large city tracks. You need to win on each track to unlock more cars and more tracks. The brilliance of the game comes in the progression. Your car is woefully under powered to win on 2 of the first 3 courses. The game doesn’t signal that you’ll need to upgrade the car. You race this 6 minute race, lose and just stare at 3 menus one of which says “speed shop”. Speed shop is where the races are won and lost. You can purchase everything from ground effects to turbines and it all impacts performance.
There are these interesting quirks in the system. Two giant ones you’ll want to know if you ever play this game. 1. Buying parts does not install them. You can buy everything in the shop leave and race and nothing will be upgraded. There is a second menu to individually install each part. You can click each part on or off. 2. There is a limiter on every car that limits the speed to 180 km/h regardless of the amount of upgrades you have. You can spend tons of points on a new turbo, mufflers, ecu and not be able to exceed 180 km/h. You have to pay and install the limiter remover. Once it’s gone, BOOM speed. The game never tells you this and figuring these things out makes you feel like a genius.
Tokyo Highway Battle becomes a very interesting game of picking out the right car to race with and invest in. Nothing clearly indicates which car is best for what track and it really depends on what you, the player, is comfortable driving. I’ve invested im the “type 6” car on the second group of tracks. It has a turbo so I figured it woulf he the fastest car out of the new group. It is…but I can’t get the handling to feel right so even on the high speed course I keep losing at the end when I slam the wall. I’ll try a different ride where the handling feels great but I need to grind to invest in the bolt on turbo because it makes the biggest speed impact in the game. That’s where this becomes a driving game to me, more than a racing game. Tokyo Highway Battle is super grind heavy and the AI car is basically a time trial aside from the fact that random highway traffic can slow the AI down. The grind is the game. The grind is bearable because the music is amazing, you get money even when you lose and you can jump back in and try again with 0 repercussions. It’s also neat that you can just grind for enough money to make a super car and brute force the win. The game doesn’t care. It’s like Outrun, just enjoy the sounds and the feel of the car and the competitive outlet is there if you want to deal with it.
Tokyo Highway Battle has a lot of personality that will become a staple of the Tokyo Xtreme series and most of Genki’s racers going forward. Every driver has a picture and a nickname. They tell you about themselves before a race. They tell you off after the race too. Each car is unique that you race against. They also allude to the Drift King being the best driver around that you need to defeat. The Drift King is the boss in almost all of the Tokyo Xtreme Racer games so it’s cool to see him in this title too.
There are a lot of games in this era that don’t hold up very well. Early 3D games have aged like milk visually. Tokyo Highway Battle stands out and is just as playable today as 20 years ago and the visuals and sound design are still impressive. Thanks for reading! Peace.
J3Blackgamer 