Hi there! Welcome to the first ever GTW Weekly Downshift. It's going to be a weekly blog where I prattle on at some length about whatever tickles my fancy; I guess you could say it's completely ripped off from partly inspired by Terronium-12's excellent Weekly Rewind over on GTPlanet.
So just the other day I was browsing my garage in GT5, and it hit me that I really have a lot of retro cars, mainly from Japan. I mean, I have a ton of them: a couple AE86s (including at least one Sichui Shinegeno Version), several NSXes from various generations, and around sixteen billion Mitsu 3000GTs/GTOs/whatever you want to call them. (Why on Earth do they keep showing up in my Used Car Dealership? Not that I mind, of course. :D) And then I happened on this seriously kickass image from Silnev on deviantART that just makes the good old Nissan R-32 GT-R look just incredible (okay...more incredible than it normally looks, because that is one seriously slick ride). Check it:
So you know what I did? I got another R-32 (in black, this time - my two others are silver and red), and I took that thing out for a ride on Special Stage Route 11. It didn't take long for a smile to come to my face. Yeah, there are a crap-ton of GT-Rs in the game, but damned if they aren't fun to drive! Seriously. The R-32 is just a blast to drive; I highly suggest buying one...or two...or 36. Preferably in real life. :D
And another thing about that drive: it was a bit nostalgic for me. I'm pretty sure I've been through those tunnels before, and over that bridge. There used to be a racing game series by the name of Tokyo Xtreme Racer. As far as I can tell, only around four copies of the games in the series were sold here in the States, and I have two of them. They were released for the PS2 way back in the day (around 2002-2003, I believe - don't quote me on that). I wound up with a copy each of TXR 3 and TXR Zero, and let me tell you, those games were insanely fun. They were, in a nutshell, a form of racing game/fighting game hybrid. You'd pull up to an opponent, flash them with your high beams to start a race (these were street racing games set on the highways in and around Tokyo at night - the game world for both of these games was categorically gigantic), and when it started, each car was given a health bar. The further you got ahead of your opponent, the faster the bar would deplete, and the first car to have its health bar deplete all the way lost, so races had no set distance; a pretty genius setup, all in all. So anyway, I'd gotten a fair distance into TXR Zero, and as far as I can recall my previous car had been a crappy little Subaru that I'd tuned the living beans out of to get it to be able to put of with the various bigger, faster cars. For the past few hours, I'd been trying to beat the area boss so that I could unlock another part of the map; the "area boss" was - and you'll never guess this - an R-32 GT-R. I challenged him knowing that the poor little Subaru, even as tuned as it was, wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the GT-R in a fair race. Somehow, though, within the first mile or two of the race, I'd managed to get the little thing out front. There was a long straight, and at any point I expected the GT-R to blow my doors off; it turned out, he had had an accident with a van, with he result that he was still behind when we got to a cloverleaf. Knowing that the Subaru was better at corners than the GT-R, I took it just in the nick of time. As I was a quarter of the way through it, I heard a crashing noise from behind, and from then on the GT-R was nowhere to be seen. On looking at the replay, it turned out that the GT-R had hit the water barrels where the cloverleaf's wall forked from the main highway and proceeded to get stuck on them for about 20 seconds before the AI driver realized it had hit the wall and backed up. By that time, I was so far ahead that there was no way he could have caught me before his life bar ran out, and I was rewarded with a brand new (old? Brand old? No, that makes no sense) R-32 GT-R.
But to be honest with you, that incident wasn't what entered my mind during that nostalgic drive in the black GT-R. The thing that entered my mind was: the R-32 GT-R must be an absolute beast in real life, because not only was it an incredibly fast car in TXR Zero, but it was also crazy fast (for a production car, at least) in GT5. Whatever the case, it was a nice trip down memory lane.
Anyway! I hope you enjoyed the first of hopefully many GTW Downshifts! I know it was certainly fun writing one. If the title rings a bell to you, then you officially know good music. And if you don't, then look up the title of the post on YouTube - you won't be disappointed. Cheers, guys, and I hope I see you around on the wiki!
--Gp75