SRS opens the game with a choice of three different game modes: Street Mode (or career mode,) Arcade Mode and Multiplayer. You can even pop the hood of each car to inspect an authentically modeled engine. Purchasing a car takes an easy drive down to the showroom, where you can cycle through available models and make your selection depending on a vehicle's top speed, horsepower, torque, brake power and price. Provided you have the funds, you'll be ripping through traffic in the Mazda RX-7 and RX-8 the Toyota Supra MR2 Spyder, Celica, Corolla (AE86) the Subaru WRX, WRX STi the Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34), 350Z the Lexus IS 300 and the Mitsubishi Evo VIII. Each car looks and handles just as it should, making the acquisition of hot rides imperative if you want to survive on the streets. SRS offers around 50 authentically modeled, officially licensed cars from manufacturers such as Nissan, Mitsubishi and Mazda. To its credit, Namco has done a great job of incorporating cars, parts and visual customizations from real-world manufacturers. When all is said and done, it's what happens on the street (digital or otherwise) that matters. It may not be realistic, and you'd be sacrificing one of the game's major selling points, but you'd also be adding another, greater one. SRS could have used a dash of artistic license like in Hollywood's portrayal of street-racing culture. But hey, it looked snazzy and made the movie suck less. And injecting nitrous oxide in your system would not, I repeat not, send your car into warp speed as it does in 2 Fast, 2 Furious. Take the Fast and the Furious flicks for example-they're not grounded in reality, which is why they're fun to watch (at least I think so, anyway.) If they had really showed what goes on in street races, things would moved that much slower. It's an iffy situation penalizing a game for being authentic, but the bottom line is that realism doesn't always translate well in videogames. Of course, purchasing new cars and modifying them helps alleviate a part of the problem. Plus, the cars feel stiff, cutting down on the all-important fun-factor even more. It may be more accurate, but when you're sacrificing the kind of excitement present in less-realistic titles like Burn Out 3, you'll swear realism sucks. Once accustomed, throttling through bends and narrow streets just doesn't feel exhilarating. While the game feels quite speedy during initial races, the effect can only be chalked up to a players lack of experience negotiating slick roads and sharp turns. Even at its fastest, when you're tearing through Miami at 200+ mph, SRS fails to conjure the sense of speed required in a street-racing title. Now that's a feature missing from most games anyway, but to have it included in a mediocre gameā¦for shame! SRS boasts increased realism through enhanced car mechanics and customization, but the cost of such practicality is too high. You can even collect hot women and trade them like baseball cards for Pete's sake. The fact is made even more frustrating because SRS boasts some truly nifty features like an open-ended city and the chance to challenge random drivers. It's fun spending hours fine-tuning your car (and most race-freaks probably will,) but most of the enjoyment never takes to the streets it stays in the garage. Did it work? Did Namco deliver a title brimming with the nuts-and-bolts of real street racing while retaining the flashy sense of escapism that made the phenomenon what it is today? Unfortunately, SRS succeeds in all the wrong places.
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