Customer Reviews

Import Tuner Challenge

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

To feed my Forza Motorsport 2 hunger, I decided to purchase this game. I'm a big fan of Japanese cars. All my cars are Japanese. Import Tuner focuses on...you guessed it...import cars, mainly Japanese brand cars- Toyota, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Mazda, and Nissan. People ask..so where's Honda? Licensing issues prevented Genki developers from including Honda.

This game delivers TONS of customizations. You can basically calibrate and modify your car based on parts you buy. However, buying upgrade parts for your car isn't that easy. All upgrade parts are level-based meaning you need to beat a boss or win races against a few rival teams to get a new level of parts to purchase. Parts don't come cheap so just racing one rival after another won't get you the goods you need once you face a fully-modified car. You'll have to go back and find a rival team you already beat and race him over and over until you get enough credit points to purchase the parts.

The game requires a lot of patience since you'll be pitted against every import car. There are two ways of challenging rivals. You either hit the streets and challenge OR you can go to the parking area and challenge racers there. To beat the game, you'll have to challenge both street racers and those who hangout by the parking lot.

The tracks are based on real highways in Japan. All the the highways have been faithfully recreated in this game. Now...since this is a race along freeway, you won't be using much of your drifting skills here since you won't find any hairpin turns. Most of the turns are like the Exit ramps you take on our Interstate highways here in the US. This should give you an idea on what's in store for you. Majority of the tracks here are straightways, a few exit ramps turns will test your turning skills. Don't be fooled though. You'll be faced with traffic on the highways. There will trucks and cars driving merrily along the highway while you're speeding at 200mph. The traffic will sharpen your skills on avoidance and overtaking. The game is quite tough on errors you make. You hit a car or a railing and chances are the rival driver will be right on your tail.

There are two modes of races here: SP battles and Time Attack. SP battles are like health meters. The farther the rival is ahead of you, the faster your health meter goes down. You hit a railing or a car and that penalizes your SP meter. The object of SP battle is to run your rival's SP meter dry. That means you'll have to outrace him or punish him by trapping him on a lane where a slow moving vehicle is right in front of him and then you accelerate at high speed to leave him behind. You can use traffic to your advantage by nudging the rival car on the side and pushing him towards an embankment. I know it's bad but hey...you gotta win by any means necessary. Time attack on the other hand is simply a race to the finish line. Why it's called Time attack just boggles the mind. This game was made in Japan so expect some translation hiccups here and there. Poorly translated Japanese terms abound in this game so expect to see weird rival names like Betelguese of the Night, Mundane Omnipotent, Cornering Opera, Mundane Zeus, Astellion Flower, and my favorite... Cat X Cat.

Graphics was where I was a bit disappointed. Genki didn't use the full power of the Xbox360. Somehow it didn't look quite next-gen to me. Also, there are horrible frame rate issues. The game just grinds to a stuttering frame rate when you have three or four rivals on screen. There are a few drawing issues as well. Sometimes, while driving, you'll notice that there's just a black empty space at the end of the ramp. Fear not, the game suffers from redrawing issues. But these issues shouldn't deter you from playing this game. AI is something that's a so-so. You will find rivals who drive like Ms. Daisy or sometimes against a rival who drives like Mario Andretti, Nicki Lauda, and Colin McRae. Most of the AI seem to be afraid to take the risk of making sharp turns at full speed. They seem to brake quite a few meters too far from the turn's entry point. As a result, you can easily take advantage of this and cut in front of them.

So...what's a good gaming tip here. Like any other tuner games, there are three things you need to focus on to win in this game: SPEED, WEIGHT, AND HANDLING. That means you need to upgrade your engine, your body, and your suspension. Don't dwell too much on making your car look like Fast and Furiousque. Concentrate first on winning a few races and invest on the three main aspects of the car. ANy part that will make your car 100lbs heavier should be compensated by a body upgrade that will make it lighter. I've beaten this game by using just one car.

Here's what I did: I purchased the Nissan Fairlady (fastest among the cheapest starter cars). I raced the hell out of it and upgraded it. Then I began challenging several rivals over and over again till I was winning 500K credit points per race. Once I got to about 4 million credit points, I bought my favorite and possibly the fastest tuner car in the game: Mitsubishi Evolution IX. I then sold my Fairlady and then upgraded the engine to the highest possible level I could get. Slowly I began upgrading the three main aspects of the car. By the time I got to about 80% of game completion, I was beating every car and rival I was up against. The Mitsubishi Evolution is by far the best tuner car I have ever dealt with, be it Forza Motorsport or Import Tuner. Try the Evolution and win every race.

In closing, this game is highly recommended. It has it's own technical issues but the fun factor is definitely in the game. Go for it.

This game has recieved absolutely no hype. I walked into EB a few days before the game's release to preorder, and no one there had even heard of it. Usually when that happens, a game has been rushed through development, is released prematurely, and as a result, the game blows.

That is not the case here.

Import Tuner Challenge is effectively the next in the line of Shutokou Battle or Tokyo Xtreme Racer (henceforth referred to as TXR) games. However, it's received a change of name, and was produced by Ubisoft instead of Crave. This has led to a few minor changes to the game. First off, this looks MUCH better than any of the previous TXR games. It won't blow a game like Test Drive Unlimited out of the water, but it's certainly a step up from NFS:MW or Ridge Racer 6. The streets of Tokyo are beautifully recreated here. The cars are well-rendered, all high-poly models. The lighting effects are up there with the best of the racing games. As far as sound goes, the techno racing tunes are uninspired, but work for the game. While I believe that the music was well-chosen for the game, I could wholly understand someone disliking it very much. Really, though, the highlight here is the sound of the cars. As you spend time upgrading your car's engine and exhaust, you can hear a difference with every little change you make. You start out with a quiet machine, and after just a few upgrades, you can hear the turbo whirring and the sounds of the wastegate. This is just extraordinarily cool for the real gearheads. To some people, this may mean nothing. However, I find it quite refreshing to hear a car sound similar to how it would in real life.

For those who haven't played a TXR game before, you're probably wondering HOW DOES IT PLAY? so I'll get to that now. The formula is simple: race, make money, upgrade car, race, buy new car, race, win money, race, ad nauseum. Sounds simple, right? It's a very basic game structure, but it works quite well. The way it's set up makes it very addictive. I personally logged over 28 hours of gameplay in the first 3 days I owned the game, and missed many a class. If you play this game, you WILL find yourself trying to find every minute possible to race and upgrade your car. This is because of the tuning system, which, while not quite on par with TXR 2 on Dreamcast or TXR 0 on PS2, is better than any other Xbox 360 game, bar none. This blows Need for Speed Most Wanted out of the water.

However, it's not for everyone. If you want to simply upgrade a car with the press of a button, take it out on the street, and beat every race without any trouble, buy Need for Speed Most Wanted. It's a solid game. That said, if you truly want a game that allows you to tune every aspect of your car, this is for you.

Plusses and minuses:

+Addictive gameplay
+Long game-should take at least 50 hours to beat
+Beautiful graphics
+Incredible tuning options
+amazing sense of speed

-Some may find the formulaic gameplay to get old
-For the first hour or so, it feels different from TXR

I'm sure this game won't get the respect that it deserves, but if you're looking for an in-depth tuning and racing game for the X360, this is for you.

This game is made by the same company that produced the Tokyo Extreme Racer series. The game play is exactly like TXR, expect the controls are a little bit tighter than they were in the previous installments of the game. The graphics in the game are very well done, but they are not next gen graphics. There is only about 10 or so cars in the game but hundreds of upgrades. The level of customization is unbeleiveable. You can cusotmize every thing from the height of the car to what the steering wheel look like. The reason I rated the game 5 starts is because the game is so much fun to play. There is no story line in the game; the main focus is to race and beat all of your rivals. All of the reviews that compare this game to Need for Speed: Underground are very misleading because Import tuner is totally different than NFSU. NFSU is an arcade sim aimed at the mass market where Import tuner is aimed at a small niche of racing fans.
If you have ever played any of TXR series you will love this game, if not you might want to rent it first.

i like this game alot. lots of stuff can be done to the cars. and the inside the car driving view is cool.

Tokyo Xtreme Racer was a game that started on the Dreamcast, it was highly animated and polished at the time, and paved the way for more racers to follow in its footsteps. The problem is, none of them did, the game was downright grindy and only a certain type of racer would fall into the grindy RPG aspects of the game, and only the Hardcore racing fans would get a lot of the innuendo and lingo that goes along with the driving aspects of the series. But that aside, the games were great, offering many customization options and a lengthy gameplay time due to the find rivals aspect. Plus many races were very difficult, with drivers racing cars that either were tuned high compared you your underpowered ride, or they simply were better than you. Either way, the games were their own breed. Import Tuner Challence (ITC) is the sequel to TXR Zero and is the latest in the series, was the jump to next gen a grandous leap, or a pathetic pitfall? Lets find out.

Modes:
There are few main modes: Quest, Single Player, and Online.

Quest Mode: This is the main meat, the game offers over 300 Rivals and over 20 factions to beat. The main idea however is simplistic, get a car, race other cars, and beat them all. Surprisingly the concept actually works well. You'll find yourself striving to beat teams on your list, and despite how simple quest mode works, (drive up, flash lights, race, repeat) the game actually maintains momentum well into chapter 3 where you'll be racing the fastest teams. Over the course of races, you'll unlock more upgrades, and other rivals to beat, and more places to race, so the game always has something to strive for. But, quest mode is monotonous, often many roads especially C1 are relatively impossible to avoid. The game never really stops using the about 60 total miles of track and you'll race over and over on the same stretches. The thing is that while this is a weakness, its also a strength, and due to the number of times you'll race the same areas, the knowledge of the roads will help you when you really need it, such as times when you're racing a faster opponent. Or taking the corner at the right speed to avoid losing that last smidge of SP to a wall tap.
Still, the amount of roads available for a game like this is very poor. As a 360 title, the game fails to deliver an adequate amount of road given the overall quality of said road.

Single player: Pretty much time trial, no rivals to race, just you and the road. You'll probably only do this mode for the achievements.

Multiplayer: A match up between you and a random Live playing opponent, either P2P race, or SP battle. Bring your A game with the best of the best cars, or you'll get smoked. The mode is fun if you have a well tuned car, otherwise you'll lose sight of taillights really fast and its more frustrating than fun.

Graphics and Sound: The car models don't look too bad, but they are substandard anyway. The road itself is lacking detail, and it has drawing issues on occasion, plus Framerate drops with 2 + rivals on screen. The game feels unfinished. The majority of my complaints graphically have to do with games that are competition. The 360 can do way better than this and whether the game is coded inefficiently or the textures were limited to increase the overall scope of the Highway, but the highway never got the chance to have extra parts added, I won't know. But it would seem that the highway was meant to be bigger, and they ran out of time.
The exhaust notes on the cars aren't very potent, nor do they change with performance upgrades. But other components are changed, such as the blow off for turbo engines. Given that little tid bit it does beg the question why mufflers and engine upgrades do not alter the sound of the engine if they can add the blow off sound for larger turbos.
Still, as a whole the game's graphics could use work, they're not bad, and not quite PS2 level, but they are not up to par with competitive games in the same genre.

Driving: This honestly is what makes this game even worth playing at all. The driving here is actually not bad. But the way if finds itself in here is. What I mean is the game is directed towards gearheads by being cryptic and not speaking down to the people who don't know the difference between a clutch and a rotor. But the game PLAYS like the games those types of people would play. It runs an arcadey driving system, granted that system works extremely well and is very customizable, the gearheads will know that this game just doesn't act like it should, and there are too many options and settings to tweak to get 100% out of your car that a casual racer won't understand or want to fool around with settings that will do this. Essentially, the game is very playable and its driving is fun, but its arcadey when everything else in the game is quite grindy and hardcore. Its unfortunate since the game could have had some very impressive difficulty if it had more sim elements.

Difficulty: Its hard at the beginning. Honestly i could leave that there, but i won't. The game is very difficult with your original car, but buy a more powerful one, and it becomes a cakewalk. The first sets of drivers are easy, and the bosses aren't much harder in a newer car, but if you stick with your older car, many crucial upgrades aren't available until mid game for that car to be competitive. For this reason its got a slow start, and washes out completely once you get a new car, keep up to date with upgrades and the game is a cakewalk, everyone will get owned and you'll be done without so much as one loss until the very last few bosses that might be hard for you. If the game didn't handle like an arcade racer, I think it'd have been harder and each race would have been more challenging. Another issue is the lack of options.

Cars: 15 cars you can upgrade purchase and use. Thats it. that's a lot of customization options, but the power plants just aren't diverse enough challenging races late game are going to be from most cars, but early races will be dominated by skylines and supras and well as mid game races. Also where's honda? Not to be whiny but you can't make a tuner game and not include Honda. The selection amount is bad, but the choices are good, still going licensed with car selection was a bad idea, literally 1/2 of the models are available here fromt he first TXR game on dreamcast. It strongly drops diversity and makes the game less believable, all for the price of having a licensed version of the car.

Overall this game is worth a budget buy, its monotonous, but it grows on you a bit if you like cars or are a fan of the TXR series. Buy it used for less than 20 bucks. More than that the game has too many shortcomings to warrant a purchase. A lot of its short comings come from graphics and under thought game mechanics, but the racing substance is there and its fun to play in the later bits. Its a hard recommend for me due to the sheer volume of better titles available, but if you're bored and tired of Need For Speed and Midnight Club. its an ok game to spend some time with.

i loved this game on Dreamcast back in 2000/01 with its Strictly Highway races that had you win by a Lead instead of racing from point A to B. this formula made racing a BLAST as it was suspenseful and never got Boring. also, the A.I. and Difficulty of the game kept you Challenged. this game is more of the same.

Pros:
-the graphics are Beautiful
-the map is Big Enough so you dont get Bored with the game too quickly
-the handling of the car is the Most Realistic, unlike alot of Current games out today
-the Customization is sure to Satisfy
-you can take your car Online and race against other racers tricked out cars as well
-the Races are just FUN.

Cons:
-theres no button to Look Around You when your racing, your stuck with the Front view and can never Gaze at the city as it goes by..but the Replay Mode should satisfy you i guess.
-the music could have been BETTER, they should have had more Electronica but the music is OKAY, it wont bother you too much.

besides that, this is a game that Well holds its own with the likes of Midnight Club LA, Burnout Paradise, Need For Speed: Undercover, and like Those games, its a game you can just Pick Up and Play..you dont HAVE to customize the crap out of the car to win races. its exactly like the Old School Tokyo Xtreme Racers though..so you dont have to track back and get those games, this game is Exactly like it with better graphics..but the same Awesome gameplay.

iLL .

Pretty good, but could do wihtout the silly bluring (speed distortion?).

Also a bit of a bummer not having the rest of the Wangan, Yokohane line, Yokohama Kanjou, or the Hanshin or Nagoya-city freeways.

this game is only a really good game if you have played the TXR racing series and like them. This game is very similar and is def just as addicting as the first ones. There are a few downfalls though. There are only like 10 cars, so you will be racing 300 cars that are the same cars throughout. Also the graphics dont appear to be 360 graphics except for your which you can modify a decent amount. One really good upgrade besides the addition of a few minor highways, is th parking area. The PA is where you will find racers parked and ready to race. Just as the last TXR games, there are many wanderers and still is a pain in the a$$ to figure out there requirements. I suggest trying to find a strategy guide if you plan on racing the Datsun that appears after all racers are beat.

If your a TXR fan and looking for a cheap and fun game then I recommend this game. Its pretty fun racing your way to the top of tokyos highways.

A decent game if you are into this type of racer.

Having played Tokyo Highway Battle PS1, Tokyo Extreme Racer 1 and 2 Dreamcast, and Tokyo Extreme Racer Zero and Tokyo Extreme Racer 3 I am a fan. It is the same people that made it. Ignore the cheesy title.

Let's talk about the bad:

Much less cars. Like about 15 (seriously). They left out a lot of cars. The series was much better when they did not have licensed cars. The selection and variety was awesome.

The graphics aren't great for what it should be. Looks more like a last generation game. This must be played on the best resolution as possible.

There is no vibration feedback for the controller at all and using a wheel there is definitely no force feedback.

Some routes are missing in this game.

The online community is pretty much dead.

Overall you can tell that these guys were lazy. It could have been much better. So much potential thrown away.

As for the good it plays just like their previous games. It is much better than TXR3 because the civilian cars have returned (the worst in the series IMO). The physics have improved. The livery editor is not good at all but better than nothing. The appearance modifications are great. There is a cockpit view. Sense of speed is good. The graphics are the best in the series. The feel and flavor is still there.

Previous fans will like this. This is a like or hate affair. I would not say love just because they got lazy and left so much out and took a step backwards.

This is probably the most real street racing you can get without being tacky like other street racing games. Although the names given and car crews and members names are funny in a good way. If you like Japanese cars and roll racing this is it.

Have you ever played Tokyo Extreme Racer? Yeah. Well this is essentially, the Xbox 360 version. I do love the fact that they kinda make fun of Tokyo Extreme Racer, with the names. You know those retarded names for the racers like "Super Dancer"? Well when you finish racing and return to your garage, it updates your name, and it's called a "B.A.D Name". The B.A.D doesn't stand for anything...except BAD!
I love it though.

Pros:
Great cars to choose from
All the cars are officially licensed
Extremely Addicting
Nice visual customizations
Great Performance tuning

Cons:
The 1990's called, they want their graphics back
The cars handle heavily
The music sounds like someone sat down with a keyboard and kept hitting random notes
No Honda's
NO AUTOSAVE

The pros make all the difference. Once you play for a little while, you get kinda sucked in, and you don't care about the cons. But I would call this game a 4 star overall, because of the lack of autosave. Basically, you need to save manually every time you go to the garage.
Also, if your a fan of need for speed style racing, or simulation games, this is not for you. You don't do laps, and win with 1st place, you have a bar that decreases when you fall behind, or hit something. There is a time attack mode though. And the physics are VERY unrealistic. But it's a great arcade racer!

I would recommend this game.