“Damn baby what you doing?!”

User Rating: 6.5 | Street Riders PSP
In Street Riders (a port conversion of “187 Ride or Die) you play as gangsta Buck, a young man who was picked off the streets and helped by Dupree, a local gang leader: now Buck must return the favour so he works for him, and your target is defeating all of Cortez’s (Dupree’s rival gang leader) minions.

Single player campaign (Story mode). There are several missions to complete, and you can do it in three ways: with your driving skills, with your shooting skills (blast your foes ahead or behind your vehicle), or with both of them, if you’re good enough at driving and shooting at the same time. You can collect health power ups, nitro boosts and weapons simply by passing on them with your car. You have to be the first at the end of every stage or you can’t go further: no second or third place are useful.
Missions are different each other (survivor, death match, minefield, whip race, eliminator).
Multiplayer mode gives more value to the game: players can choose if they prefer playing as the driver or as the shooter.

Graphics of the game caused me mixed reactions: the environments are urban neighbourhoods, and tracks are quite interesting but you basically play all the challenges in the same neighbourhood before moving to another one so after a while the show could look a little repetitive. Anyway a weak point is that graphics are not very detailed (though a port the PSP hardware can manage something better). There are good cutscenes to show Buck’s story and frame-rate doesn’t suffer from slow downs.

Sound effects of the fire fights are decent and dialogues are very raw (this is good to create the most suitable atmosphere but prepare to hear a lot of nasty words and profanities). Music is on the same frequencies of the characters, so if you like the genre it’s ok, though repetitive.