"I wish I had something positive to say about this game."
This is not the same D1 as the videos you torrent from Japan. This is not the fun loving, happy, and entertaining D1 that you see in those videos in the least bit. The announcers are about as pleasant to listen to as that infamous school bully that always used to pick on you and steal your lunch money. They basically tell you consistently that you suck and are the worst driver ever to get behind the wheel. This will really encourage you to keep playing and get better, right? They expect you to play this game which is broken beyond any form of repair and be perfect at it. By the way, I'm a girl, stop calling me a he, it's just as annoying as the ridicule that you spew at me every five feet that I drive for not being good enough for your fascist judging styles. I'd really like to take some of that duct tape the drivers use to tape the bumpers back on their cars and wrap it around the announcer's heads.
The controls are awful. Yeah the cars drift ok, but they are very inconsistent. Drifting is difficult in the first place, having the cars feel like you're driving with bald tires on a lumpy frozen lake doesn't help. I don't expect an arcade style control system like those in the NFSU and more recent NFS games at all, but the fact that I can drift decently on Gran Turismo 4 and not on a game where you're supposed to drift makes it apparent that something is horribly wrong here. Also for some reason, to get the accelerator all the way on, I have to pretty much push the X button through the back of the controller. I know this isn't my controller but rather the game, because this is the only game that this happens on.
Before I got to this point, I was forced to play through the tutorial, which was rather frustrating due to the fact that every time I would mess up, the announcer would tell me, "uuuh, you're supposed to keep drifting..." Like I don't know that. I made a mistake, it's a tutorial, don't talk to me like I should be perfect on my first try, you stupid voice actor. I've read in other reviews of the game that the tutorial is immensely frustrating and will take forever with tons of restarts. Somehow I made it through this relatively quickly, only having to restart any specific task a maximum of 3 times. Hey, I must be pretty good, huh?? =D
The scoring system is unbelievably inconsistent. There have been multiple times where I slide into a corner at a low angle and I get told that my angle is high, and gain points, then slide in the same way on the next corner and be told the exact opposite. To be precise, "STUPID", in big blue letters, even though the drift was exactly the same as the so called good one that even I thought was bad on the previous corner.
In terms of the amount of depth associated with this game, it's about as deep as Time Crisis at the arcade, which being an arcade game, isn't supposed to have any depth in the first place. They probably would've been better off releasing this title as an arcade game rather than a home console game altogether.
I'm a little confused here, because I thought this was a PS2 game. but the graphics look more like when I run my PSX games through the emulator on my computer, because it really looks like a PSX game with smoother graphics. The environments are so bland and boring, it's actually closer to looking like one of those really bad PC games, like Big Rigs Over The Road Racing, or similar games. Too bad you can't drive through the walls and buildings like you can in that game, because it would make this one a lot more fun. The only things that look -ok-, are the cars themselves, but those too are far from impressive.
Why you can't completely turn off the music / announcers / sfx is beyond me. all three are really bad, especially the first two...
I just did another run, and apparently I'm an embarrassment to D1. No, D1PGGP or however you want to abbreviate this title as, is an embarrassment to D1.
This game needs to be repossessed from every owner, and the government needs to step in and tell everyone who has ever known of this game that they will kill their family if they ever mention its existence, in a cover up that rivals the Roswell incident. Yuke's also needs to stick to wrestling games, because it's blatantly obvious that they have less than no clue how to make what would even be considered to be as good as a bad driving game. I can honestly say that this is the worst driving game I have ever played, and I've played Initial D: Mountain Vengeance. If that doesn't make you shudder, nothing will.