

In the Garage menu, you can mod your selected car in four ways. With sufficient runs, I had some money saved up, and so was able to power up the car, and from here the fun and the drift just went ballistic. Still, each run round the car park saw my score get better, as I learned how best to extract drift that was hidden inside the sleeping monster. Taking a stock car out on track is a bit underwhelming, as you’d imagine, as they don’t have much power, struggle to kick the back end out and lack the ability to hold extended drifts. I initially opted for the Hachi Roku (imagine me rolling my eyes here) as it is a hero car in Initial D, and obviously I had to paint it in the traditional Panda style. It just seems a little dishonest to try and sidestep licencing in this manner.Īnyway, we start off, as is traditional in these games, with a weedy bunch of underpowered, asthmatic cars that would struggle to pull the skin off a rice pudding. This is however a real pet hate of mine, as I can clearly see that the car I’m driving is a Camaro, yet it’s called a Hornet, and even that’s a bit too close to Bumblebee from Transformers. And it’s the same here: the Hachi Roku is a Toyota AE86 (Hachi Roku is the Japanese nickname for this car, meaning almost literally 86), the Panther is a Mazda MX5 and so on.

Long story short, no matter what kind of ridiculous body kit the drift cars sported, I could tell what they were. I quickly learned to tell my AE86 from my Supra, my S13 Silvia from my S15 Silvia, my Skyline from my 350Z, my… you get the picture. Now, when I was a younger man, I used to take to take part in 1/10th scale RC Drift contests the length and breadth of the land, and quite often these were run in tandem with the British Drift Championship in its early days. First off and I’ll admit that I was initially disappointed to see that the names of the cars included here weren’t what they should be.
