Platted on PS3 back in 2010.

While I like Dark Souls 1 more, this game has so many odd systems - World Tendency is truly wild - and the willingness to make every world's final boss a "puzzle boss" is bold. The world isn't very well-connected so it feels more like Mega Man as compared to Dark Souls' Metroid. And, of course, obtuse RPG mechanics including carry weights and absurd upgrade costs. I'm in love.

To get a plat I had to farm one specific enemy that only shows in one specific area at maximum black world tendency (requiring me to go offline and suicide like 50 times to tank my tendency) for hours. No wonder you never see people with maxed out Sharp modifiers lol. I love this shit.

Great game. Deranged.

I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.

It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.

What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.

User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.

2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.

You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.

This is the full log of my journey with Daytona USA and my chronicles and attempts to play each version.

-Mid 2022-
1. Saturn port. Bad.

2. Original with MAME. Fine, but isn't fully compatible.

3. Xbox 360 port via Xenia. Full dump doesn't exist online.

4. PS3 port via RPCS3. Found it in the dark recesses of a personal Russian game dumper's blog. Fantastic version, the definitive, best way to play Daytona.. on controller. Gear shifting is botched through button presses, and while incremental gear shifting is allowed through shoulder buttons, the game was designed to be going from gears 4 to 2 and back, mostly. Going from gears 4 to 3 to 2 and back results in unreliable and unpredictable drifts most of the time. I craved more but was running out of options.

-Q4 2022-
5. Daytona Championship Circuit on Saturn. Worst. Do not.

-Early 2023. Got myself a steering wheel for arcade racers. I do not yet have a shifter.-
6. Reattempted MAME with wheel. Buggy but ultimately playable, but did not satiate my hunger. I missed the cleanness and definitiveness of the 7th gen ports, but neither Xenia nor RPCS3 have proper wheel support, and I was not looking to map controller input to a wheel axis. I wanted real wheel interaction.

7. Discovered SEGA Racing Classic. 2009 arcade re-release without any Daytona branding because of the license expire. The excellent 7th gen ports used this version as the base. Runs as an .exe via SEGA RingWide and took me hours of scouring and old forum surfing to find the full dump and loader. Works with my wheel, feels incredible to play. This is the one. Unfortunately, graphics are fucked due to NVIDIA GPU incompatibility (looks perfect on AMD, however). A shoddy patch exists. I get a "Cannot find Folder app.dll" error. I found one person in a YouTube comments on a gameplay showcase video with 42 views who mentioned they got this same error. There is a long thread, mostly all of it is broken non-understandable English and a general lack of tech jargon knowledge between both people to amicably find the fix. After hours of searching elsewhere, I cannot find any mention of the error elsewhere. The trail is once again cold, but for now, somehow, this lame re-release, with all of its iconic branding stripped (even the soundtrack is altered so you don't hear Mitsuyoshi's iconic "DAYTONAAAAAA" shout), is somehow the best playing version for someone in my extremely, extremely specific situation. My heart goes out to that guy who had that same error message, shouted in the void, and somehow got a response but with no resolution. I feel much like him.

lovely little kusoge from ex-taito developers making a 3D spiritual successor to elevator action. taut from back-to-front and surprisingly focused too! it's a rare japanese first-person shooter in the metroid prime / resident evil 4 control mode: tank controls, strafe button, back-turns, IR aiming. turning while moving is smooth, and enemy bullets lack hitscan that would make them otherwise bothersome to dodge. actual enjoyment of said combat relies heavily on your inherent enjoyment in popping two to the dome of random mooks running around the fifty-floor complex you're invading, since their behavior is idiotic and their attack patterns mostly identical to one another. floor layouts primarily feature tight hallways that create mini light-gun challenges for you to undertake; thinking of it through that lens is more engaging than a traditional FPS imo.

didn't play it more than once, but it seems the layout is semi-randomized? I imagine this mostly boils down to simply which hallways appear inconveniently cluttered with stacked furniture between runs. regardless, progression takes place in ten-floor chunks, each of which features a separate map and data disk for you to collect. stumble around blindly until you mow down some (usually red) goon with the map, and then closely examine the labryinth's layout until you determine where a similarly notable goon with the data disk might be. retrieve the disk and navigate down to the bottom of the section where the gate to the next area has been disarmed. the game's worst sin (outside of looking drab) revolves around data disk collection in the mid-game, where the devs get a hair too clever and mandate backtracking to previous sections in order to collect certain disks after killing someone who seems like the disk-holder in a lower section. totally understand that this otherwise-brief game needed some padding, but the dripfeed of exploration ceases in these sections, and it makes the game's cheapness all the more glaring.

other biggest element of the loop consists of picking up various powerups. the most useful of these is a radar that alerts you to where enemies will approach from; true to the elevator action legacy, all enemies appear out of the many, many doors that line each hallway. the player can also collect night-vision goggles which allow them to see when the electricity has been knocked out for a floor, which is more-or-less a get-out-of-jail free card the player can cash if they see an electrical panel or whatever and are running low on health. other than standard health pickups, there's also both shotguns and machine guns at the player's disposal to procure ammo for outside of their unlimited-magazine standard-issue pistol. these are amusing enough (I love how the shotguns basically just shoot a giant bullet), but switching weapons is time-consuming in a game where pincer formations appear quickly around the player. besides, the pistol packs a fucking punch regardless, and why would you want to play this game if it didn't? the game never reaches a difficulty where these decisions are meaningful; on one hand I would have potentially enjoyed a hard mode to enjoy after credits rolled, but I don't think I would have been eager to see the results of such an addition to a work that was already so hastily constructed.

When nostalgia hits you like a truck…. For the wrong reasons.

There will always be games you remember from your childhood that you never got to play. Maybe because of a trailer you saw or because the cover art is so ingrained in your head for whatever reason. Dead to rights was always that game for me even though I don’t really find the cover art that crazy for some reason always popped up in my head every once in a while. A while back I bought 1-2 and they were just sitting on the shelf so I thought it was finally time to throw down with these games that I never grew up with. Sadly that is where the fun memories end because this game does not hold up well.

Fun but flawed

I want to start off by saying I played the Xbox version which on paper shouldn’t really mean much HOWEVER idk how true this is but I heard this version was way more difficult then the others. Obviously I haven’t played the PS2, Gamecube versions so I can’t fully say but I will say I can believe due to how frustrating this game got at certain points. To begin, this is a max payne clone through and through and that doesn’t have to mean anything bad because in general the formula for Max Payne is immensely fun so I wouldn’t mind more clones. Dead to rights gets this aspect right enough to make a fun enough experience but lord does it get frustrating. To explain, I like the gunplay honestly but whoever thought of the melee aspects should never touch a game again. Not only is the Melee in this game horrible but they had the bright idea of making a WHOLE LEVEL BASED AROUND IT on top of MULTIPLE BOSS FIGHTS THAT ARE MELEE only. The hand to hand combat makes ZERO sense and will make you want to throw your controller across the room. It seems simple on paper with punch , kick , grab and block and yet they somehow make it the most mundane thing ever. When you fight enemies sometimes they will power through your punches , will block and instantly punish you in which you can do NOTHING about it. The grabbing is somehow even more annoying because you can break out of a grab but if you do not press the button within .5 seconds you will get thrown and SO MUCH of your HP will be gone. Honestly I wouldn’t ramble about Melee if it wasn’t shoved in your face as much as it was in this game because it was really that annoying. Luckily the gun sections which do take up most of the game's runtime are fun and will keep you entertained enough. You have a decent amount of gun selection in the game in which you pick up from the enemies once you defeat them. And how can we forget about the best boi Shadow who is not only a good doggo but also VERY helpful during annoying segments. During the game Shadow can be used to instantly kill an enemy if you are within range in which he will grab their weapon to give to you. Using Shadow is insanely important as he will lower the enemy count on top of giving you weapons / ammo from them.


Why?

Oh boy oh boy here we get to the fun part of this review in which I will complain about everything. To begin, the damage counter makes zero sense with weapons because some pistols do piss poor damage while others do a lot. Snipers in particular do literally NO damage and it got to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong. In which game do you know a sniper to be the weakest weapon? Using a sniper should make you feel powerful when you land shots but in Dead to rights you mine as well be using a nerf gun if you pick up a sniper. This only escalates even more annoyingly since enemies from what I can tell have the most OP versions of these guns and will mow you down with the same exact gun you pick up and shoot green pea bullets with. Furthermore , the lock on system gets insanely annoying with it flinging to everyone around you but the one person you want to aim at making you slowly cycle through them until you aim at the one you wanted to aim at. When you dive into slow down the lock on system will sometimes just straight up not work even though you literally are right next to enemies. You can actually free aim in this game but why in the world you will freely use it I will never know because it's terrible lol. Furthermore , this game's difficulty only brought out the more terrible aspects of this game to me. There were certain segments where the game clearly wants you to try stealth killing some enemies but the issue is enemies will almost instantly catch you. On top of spotting you instantly everyone in this game apparently is a trained gold medalist for disc shooting because EVERYONE will laser aim at you and sometimes will even shoot you through the tiniest hole in a wall. I understand shooters from this era usually had laser aim enemies but when you mix it with the BS difficulty this game has it will not make you feel good. In addition , the bosses were all underwhelming and the final boss was insanely annoying until you figured out what you had to do. Cover mechanics are present in the game but I almost found them pointless since the moment you pop out the enemies will instantly beam in your direction thus having you struggle to get out of cover. Weirdly enough this game isn’t super long but I still felt like the ending portions of the game dragged out making me believe they could have cut 30 mins to an hour of the game out. Story is very basic but it will get the job done for the most part. LAST BUT NOT LEAST as it's been brought up throughout this review let's get into the difficulty. To put it simply it is outrageous imo since there isn’t even any difficulty option so you are just stuck with one option which will put you through pain. Certain level segments are set up to have you instantly get showered with bullets and if you have no armor your HP will instantly DRAIN. It gets so bad to the point you almost can softlock yourself during a level if you load into a segment with little HP where enemies instantly shoot at you from every direction. This actually almost happened to me when I got to a part where you walk up some stairs and are greeted by 3 snipers + a buttload of enemies with NO armor to pick up. I am not sure why the xbox version is so much more difficult than the other console versions and it made me want to actually try the versions just to see how much of a difference it is.


In the end

Honestly this game isn’t the worst thing ever, it just simply doesn’t hold up well and maybe the other console versions are a bit better. This game runs for cheap so honestly I still say give it a spin and see for yourself since it won’t break the wallet and may provide you some fun. I do recommend staying away from the Xbox version and going for the PS2, gamecube version but I would not expect anything out of this game for the most part. I wonder how the sequels will be!


I just realized even in what should have been the positive section that I was rambling about the bad more LOOOL