wangan midnight

[wylin]

September 20, 2001 - Have you ever dreamed of a game in which you drive through the highways of Tokyo, challenging drivers into high-speed street races? Stop dreaming. This game of your dreams has arrived, courtesy of Namco's arcade team.
Of course, we should point out that the game first arrived a few years back on the Dreamcast through Genki. It was followed a couple of years later by a sequel. And we're not going to even mention the original PlayStation version.

Namco used the JAMMA trade show to debut Wangan Midnight, a System 246 arcade driving game based on the popular comic of the same name. This game is so remarkably similar to Genki's Tokyo Xtreme Racer series that we're surprised the Genki logo is nowhere to be found on the cabinet.

See if you can recognize this. You drive around Tokyo Highway, searching for a racing opponent. When you encounter an opponent, the game enters race combat mode. Your car has a life gauge (referred to as an "SP" meter), which dwindles down when you're trailing in a one on one race. You and your opponent (who has a big "R" on top of his car) race until either time runs out or one person looses all his SP.

That is the premise behind Wangan Midnight, and yes it's almost identical to the Tokyo Xtreme series of titles. You no longer flash your high-beams in order to challenge an opponent to a race, and the game features a few comic-book influences, but otherwise, you'll be shocked at the similarities.

The game even looks similar to Tokyo Xtreme, although this is to be expected since both games take place on the same set of real-life roads. Namco has improved the visual quality of the game considerably, though, with a greater number of buildings and a more colorful road way. Car models look about the same between the two.

We got to try out the game in its sixty percent state. Our car was having some problems rebounding from a crash and would bounce all over the place, making it a bit tough to race, although this could be a problem with calibration of the steering wheel. Ignoring this, the sense of speed seems to match TXR; again, this should be expected, as both games have you speeding through the two lane Tokyo Highway at over two hundred kilometers per hour.

When the final version of Wangan Midnight ships, we hope to see either the Genki name, or the names of the creators of the Tokyo Xtreme series somewhere in the credits. Otherwise, Namco will have committed one of the most blatant rip offs in gaming history.

-- Anoop Gantayat, Contributor

anyone into wangan racing the highspeed highway battle life style. i really want to build a car for this!

[wylin]

basically wangan is ultra highspeed ussually 260-300kph (140-186mph) ultra high speed highway battles note. you can see them in socal on the 60 freeway where the phase2 rx-7 used to prowl and alota supra's and eurocars prowl for a good highspeed run.