Initial D: Mountain Vengeance

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $3.99

Features:

• Choose your rally team - the Akina Speed Stars, Night Kids, Red Suns or Impact Blue -- all with numerous skills and abilities, all waiting to take you on
• Ignite your engine and get behind the wheel as one of 8 racers trying to prove themselves
• Maneuver the winding roads of four treacherous mountains - Akina, Myogi, Akagi and Usui
• Test yourself in the blood-chilling Duct Tape Deathmatches - where only the most experienced racers survive
• Make it through multiple races at maximum acceleration, to unlock bonus tracks & music taken straight from the hit anime

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Inital D: Mountain [...]Box [Posted on 2004-12-15]
After a stupidly long install process for 314 megs, presumably taken up by the high quality music, yeah right. The first impression you get of the games quality, is the catagory located within the start menu; You will find it under ValuSoft. An incredible lead in to what is bound to be a fantastic adventure.

After you find it under this appropriately titled company, you are confronted by the best graphics (Or possibly an error saying your computer isn't good enough to run this game) and again, have the name ValuSoft forced into your face. Fair enough. Yeah right.

[...]But after gettign over the hilarity, you are confronted with the best intro you are ever likely to see (in this game). Now, this intro has a fantastic feel to it, you can see exactly where they go the high qulaity images from the base series 'Initial D' were taken, No wait you really can't, [...]. Plus the music would put off even a pilled up raver from dancing. I understand this music to be from the dubbed version of the anime, something which i have not subjected myself to in fear of commiting suicide.

Once this debacle is over, you are confronted with the games best "highlight", the GUI menu. Seriously. No, I really mean it. It looks good. Thats just about it, oh, you can also click things.

Once you've set up your account, you get to race as "Tak", of all the good names, this one never actually appears as a nickname in the anime. This is a shortening of the name Takumi, which is apparently too japanese for mainstream america. And also, these days, you kids want to abreviate everything. Right, you end up having your first race against "Cole" or Iketani as he is really called, how they got that name I'm not sure. Wierdos.

Anyway, you race him, let's look at the "technicalities" of the game. First of all, you get to pull off, by changing from neutral into drive if you're racing automatic, or first gear if you live in the land of manual transmission. But either way, you can't fail to pull off faster no matter how hard you hold down the "Go forwards/backwards if you've pressed r" key. As Takumi's 86 is profoundly superior.... to the S13 you're racing, you can pull away from him and pretty much not see him for the rest of the race. That would be, of course, if you could handle the car. The steering is so responsive that taking a straight is nigh on impossible, yet, when corners are involved, the car completely fails to change direction without colliding with the barrier. Familiarise yourself with the barrier, you will collide with it alot, and you will also find that it's the best way to take a corner. However, if you can initialise a drift, by pressing b, the drift button, do not be drawn into attempting counter-steer, as this again results in a fond embrace with the barrier, you're new lover, who wilfully guides you around the corner. Wow. No, WOW!

Ah yes, let's take another look at this "Drift" button. The default setting is auto-drift, which we presume most cars are allready set to, as we have yet to find the drift button in any of our vehicles. Now, as stated, the drift button, "drifts", by this of course, I mean that there is no change in direction, and that your car has only turned a slight bit sideways, of course, allowing you to see both your headlights, and both of your taillights at the same time. Nice. *jazz hands*

A guide to staying on the road: Don't play this game. If you do play this game, do not try and go above any speed, as this will result in either graphical errors, i.e. seeing the bottom of the road for a split second, or handling errors, where in your car wobbles for no reason at all. And don't worry, if this does occur, for all the attempts you can make to control this fiasco, it will only get worse, and you probably will get stopped by a tree or have a loving embrace with the barrier.

Key features of the games first race:
> The inability to tell if you're going up or down hill in the downhill course of Mount Akina.
> The three humped back bridges of Mount Akina... Ok then... This one astounds me.
> The five moderate directional changes of Mount Akina. Presumably imitating the five hairpins of Mount Akina, yet resemble a shoehorn better.

Ok, This almost ends my review, primarily because I never completed Akina and uninstalled it within 10 minutes of the end of the installation process, including a reboot of my computer. That alone tells you how much I "Valu" (LOL) this game.

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