Porsche Challenge is a racing game exclusively dedicated to Porsche's
awesome new roadster called Boxster. The game was developed in
collaboration with Porsche. As a result of this collaboration the game
features only Porsche Boxsters as cars and focuses more on realistic
look and feel of these Boxsters than on fast and furious action and
spectacular crashes.

The game includes a few neat features not seen before in PSX racers:

* Driver personalities during races: The designers have not confined
  to the usual driver personalities that end after you've selected one
  of them. In Porsche Challenge you see your (polygonal, texture
  mapped) driver sitting in his/her car steering, occasionally you
  hear him/her commenting the race (my favourite: the shocked 
  "my Boxster!!!" if you ram another car).
* plausible tracks: I've always longed for a racer that gives
  me the feeling of driving hilly roads or city streets way too fast. 
  Need for Speed tried but didn't quite convince me. In Porsche 
  Challenge (esp. driving the Stuttgart track) there are plenty of 
  situations where you approach a crest of the track without seeing 
  anything after this crest.
* Interactive mode: As you approach a track fork one the
  game will randomly open/close one track part or enable a shortcut. 
  This makes it important to react fast.
* Excessive honking: The other drivers will honk madly at you
  if you blocking their way, you can honk back just as madly :-)

It started with a lie... or at least with a gross exaggregation. When
I read "24 tracks" on the back of the CD case I was pretty amazed. Too
bad that the number of tracks actually present in the game is 4, not
24. The clever arithmetic that the designers apply to make you think
there's 6 times of the actual tracks present is "each track has two
different extensions giving us 12 different tracks, if we now count
the same tracks mirrored we're at 24.". With this kind of counting
even Ridge Racer would feature six tracks... A "serious" estimation of
the number of tracks would probably end up at 8 - the sums of the
track variations is probably as long as the tracks are. Does a game as
good as Porsche Challenge really need such a stupid cheat to sell
well?

The closest resemblance to another racing game is probably much Need
for Speed meets a bit of Ridge Racer with far (far far) better
graphics. Driving the Boxster is quite an experience. For a game
that's basically an arcade racer Porsche Challenge does an excellent
job in modeling every aspect of the car's physics accurately, be it
gearbox, ie. acceleration based on RPM (remember the Ridge Racers'
awkward "always best to stay in the 6th gear" implementation?), be it
the car's fish-tailing in tight turns, be it influences of braking or
accelerating on the car's "steerability". The physics may not be as
realistic as Need For Speed's or Formula 1's but they feel extremely
natural (eg. compared to the artificial Powerslide of the Ridge Racer
series) and make every single turn a challenge.

After starting up Porsche Challenge you're treated with a slick
designed and really beautiful menu system that lets you adjust all
relevant options including exotic but useful ones like centering the
image, adjusting the digital/analog pad buttons and so on. You can
select one of six drivers that differ in the color and handling of
their Boxster, a difficulty level (easy, medium, hard), a game type
(simulation or arcade) and a playing mode (championship, training,
time trial, two-player split-screen).  A championship consists of
three mini-championships of four races each (first short tracks, then
with extensions, then "interactive", ie.  extensions are
activated/deactivated randomly during the race). You have only five
(three in hard difficulty) attempts to win every race of a
mini-championship. After you've managed to do so you can save your
game to memory card and start the next mini-championship.

Graphics are outstanding and probably the best I've yet seen in a PSX
racing game.  Wipeout XL may have nicer special effects, Motor Toon
GP2 may be more colorful, but Porsche Challenge features the most
realistic textures of the track and the objects along its side and the
most beautifully rendered cars around - instead of tiny lumps of
pixels each car is gouraud shaded and light-sourced, every driver is a
little polygon character that even steers, tires and brake lights are
animated appropriately. And Porsche Challenge isn't plagued by _any_
of the notorious PSX polygon bugs like distortion, paper-thin walls,
clipping errors, visible polygon seams - very impressive. Furthermore
the game runs at a perfect frame rate all the time. The only problem
Porsche Challenge's graphics _does_ have is very visible pop-up.

Sound effects are done very well - engine noise and squealing tires
sound realistic, beautiful background noises like bells ringing placed
very well in the stereo range add a lot of atmosphere to the game. The
background music is supposed to change depending on the situation.  In
reality there's some pale and generic pop playing all the time.

Solid gameplay: Porsche Challenge combines the excellent car handling
and track physics of eg.  Need For Speed with the fast-paced action of
eg. Ridge Racer Revolution. The (analog) controls are very responsive
and precise, the car reacts in a incredibly natural way to them. And
it's good that it does - the tracks are tricky and require a lot of
"stepping" off the accelerator to slide, releasing the accelerator
button a bit to increase steerability at nearly full speed or even
brake and change gear in really tight turns. In this regard the game
is most similar to Wipeout - you keep playing just to get the
satisfaction of having completed a real good lap. The only thing
that's lacking in Porsche Challenge is a decent number of
opponents. With only six cars on the track you'll find yourself racing
all alone most of the time. Opponent AI is similar to the Ridge Racer
series in easy and medium difficulty, in hard difficulty however your
opponents will drive fast and mean. They've got about the same top
speed you have and they'll try everything to ram you off the
track. All you can do is give your best and exploit the fact that
they're not that good at cornering. In addition to this, one
"arch-rival" like the yellow car in Ridge Racer will always be close
behind you, ready to take over if you make a mistake.

All in all, Porsche Challenge is a very solid racing game that
captures the joy of driving sports cars at high speeds remarkably
well. With 24 track variations and three difficulty settings it takes
a while to master and I dare to predict that because of the precise
controls and the tricky tracks this will be a game you keep playing
after winning it just to get that perfect lap/race, making it one of
the few long-time motivating racers.

My rating for Porsche Challenge: 9 out of 10 points (no 10/10 because
of the only 6 cars competing, the minor pop-ups and the consequent but
a bit annoying restriction to the Boxster).

A souped-up version of this review incl. screenshots and links
to more information is available at
http://herkules.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/kag/psx/game_pc.html

Karlheinz

-- 
      Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 513 1667
 Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 513 1806
 Department of Computer Science    |  email: kag@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de
Technical University Of Chemnitz   |  http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~kag
My PSX pages start at http://herkules.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/kag/psx