Enthusia Professional Racing (PS2)
Manufacturer: Konami of America, Inc. Part number: 20121
- More product information:
- Editors' review
- User reviews
- Specifications
- Manufacturer info
- Description:
- Recently, every other car game has wanted to keep your head under the hood. At long last, here's a racer that gets your focus back on the wheel. ENTHUSIA - Professional Racing uses a new technology called the Visual Gravity System (VGS) to convey a true sense of G-force while maneuvering at breakneck speeds. This is a killer first ... Read more
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Gamespot editors' review
Enthusia Professional Racing (PS2) price range: $19.99
- Reviewed by: Brian Ekberg
- Reviewed on: 05/03/2005
- Updated on:05/06/2005
- Released on: 05/03/2005
Enthusia Professional Racing looks to take the racing simulator fight directly to its high-profile PlayStation 2 rival, the much-lauded Gran Turismo series. Rather than following the path of many racing games on the same platform, looking to imitate the GT franchise's approach, Enthusia takes a very different--and sometimes innovative--approach to the collectible car game. While the game's touchy driving model and overly complex career mode won't appeal to everyone, Enthusia is a worthy game for those looking for something different in the four-wheel genre.
Enthusia is a driving game that places a premium on driving skill, not necessarily tuning knowledge. Sure there are options to adjust numerous handling settings on your car, but for the most part the game wants you behind the wheel fighting it out for first place in any of the game's more than 200 available cars. What this means from a gameplay standpoint is a driving engine that is sensitive and touchy, sometimes brilliant, and often frustrating. Firstly, if you think other driving games have perfected the springy feeling of suspension before, you obviously haven't played Enthusia yet. Weight transfer into and out of corners and under heavy braking is dramatically emphasized not only through the handling of the car but visually as well; cars will lurch under heavy braking, and unless you can carry momentum through a curve in as straight a line as possible, your lap times will suffer.
Working in tandem with the bouncy nature of the driving model is Enthusia's visual gravity system, a visual representation of the forces acting upon your car, tires, and even the driver itself. There are several types of VGS displays. The first is a small car icon that indicates the direction your front tires are facing, the amount of forces acting upon them, and the general direction of G-forces acting upon the car itself. The second display is a frame that shows forces acting both on the car and your virtual driver in a sort of screen-within-a-screen fashion. When you enter a turn, the screen will slightly shift left, right, up, or down to convey the forces working against your driver's head as he pilots the car. Illuminated onscreen arrows further illustrate the direction and power of the G-forces working against your car. Honestly, while the system is cool to look at, and seems remarkably sensitive to the slightest subtle movements of your car, it doesn't really present any sort of essential information that you can't get from the overall "feel" of the car itself. Luckily you can turn the displays off altogether if you want.
From a driving standpoint, first-time Enthusia racers will find that being quick on the track is as much an exercise in restraint as it is raw horsepower. The game's mostly fictional tracks blend some nice straights with tight and twisted hairpins that never let you feel complacent with the car's handling, and therefore braking distances and controlled turns should never be taken for granted. There's no shoving your car into a turn and hoping to powerslide your way around the apex; carefully modulated throttle and restrained braking will be your best friends in this game. Rear-wheel-drive cars are especially tough to drive in Enthusia, displaying a huge tendency for oversteer and requiring incredible amounts of patience (and driving touch) to be successful in. While the game touts an incredibly realistic physics engine, it's hard to believe rear-wheel-drive cars are this twitchy in real life. As one colleague put it to us, "If rear-wheel-drive cars handled in real life the way they do in Enthusia, no one would ever buy one."
Combine this with only a moderate sense of speed (bolstered somewhat through the use of stylized blur lines at the edge of the screen at high speeds), and you have a driving model that is complex in execution but often plodding in pace. To make matters worse, the cars entered into a race tend to be from a huge spectrum of performance abilities, and on longer races, the field tends to spread out pretty quickly so that even if you're in the middle of the pack positionwise, you may not have a car either behind or in front of you that's in sight.
User reviews
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a great racer, but doesn't excell in any way
by rotarydrifter on December 29, 2008
Pros: extremely true to life cars
great for practicing oversteery cars
force feedback support
a touge track
penalizes you for bumping thingsCons: force feedback support is not that strong
career mode is just confusing
lack of ability to tune cars
collecting cars is just based off luckSummary: Graphics: it's pretty good compared to most last gen games. not as stylish as txrd2 or photo realistic as gt4. skid marks disapear from the track.
sounds: music doesnt ...Summary: Graphics: it's pretty good compared to most last gen games. not as stylish as txrd2 or photo realistic as gt4. skid marks disapear from the track.
sounds: music doesnt stand out at all. the car engines sound pretty good. They got the beeping sound on RX-7 cars to tell you when to change gears
gameplay: career mode is really just frustrating in this game. someitmes you win and lose points or get nothing, and sometimes you gain points for not doing much. gaining car's is also odd since the chances of winning better cars doesn't improve as place better. I like how you get penalized for hitting things but since the AI sucks, they purposely hit you at times. you also lose some enthu points for using the initial D gutter technique in some tracks like autum mountain, which is just not right. They discourage you to not change cars, since you lose enthu points and have to wait a week which is a bad thing. Driving revolution is just tedious and boring.
The physics in this game is probably the best as far as stock cars go. Stock cars don't all come equiped with some ABS, TCS like TXRD2 & GT4. It's also got GT4 beat when it comes to driving over bumps and elevation changes, but it doesn't compare to TXRD2 in that department. At high speeds you don't really get the same unstability feelings as TXRD2 or true pc sims. the braking is not really good since it always lunges forward as long as you are traveling in a straight line. It just feels like theres some abs in all cars. The game also does not suffer from brake fade or tire wear like TXRD2 did. If you are used to playing TXRD2 with drift tuned oversteery cars, the physics in this game seem tame and somewhat boring while trying to drift.
Tracks in this game are decent. there aren't too many real ones, but tsukaba is in it, which is one of my favorites. dragon range is one of the best tracks ever, since I love touge racing.
Tuning is one of the biggest weeknesses in this game. you can adjust a few suspension settings, LSD maneuverability, gear ratio, but thats about it. you cannot disable ABS and TCS in cars that have them. All cars feel like they either have a LSD or open diff, nothing seems like they have a 2 way LSD. I understand how they want to focus on skill than horse power, but play TXRD2 and they captured that aspect a lot better.
The lack of tuning and oversteery physics made it really easy to initiate a drift compared to most games, but you cannot have nearly as much fun creating big angles and controlling truly hard to handle cars like TXRD2.
the game supports 900 degree force feedback wheel. it does have a clutch button and full/semi manual cars which is unique for ps2. i'm not sure if it supports the G25 functions. the feedback itself is mediocre. There's less feedback from gt4 n txrd2. meaning that dirt doesnt feel as good and steering doesnt get tighter at high speeds. I have to manually counter steer more while drifter compared to most other sims where i let the wheel slip by itself more, which is more unrealistic if you ever handled an oversteery car in real life.
This game is a great side game for occasional occasions. It's better than GT4 in terms of physics, but it doesn't offer nearly as much in other aspects. It does have a touge course which is a welcomed addition. but if you want a touge simulator with challenge get TXRD2. it's got more real tracks, with it's drift mode, weather changing systems, and superior tuning aspects to make your car more fun to drive, while it demands even more skill once you get into it. I did use this game to get better at TXRD2 since learning to handle stock oversteery cars is good. once i went back to TXRD2 then went back to enthusia, enthusia just seemed tame and understeery. Which makes enthusia cars easy to grip as opposed to what most other reviewers claim. If you want a true simulator, no console game can really compare to pc sims like Live for Speed, or you can get GT5 prologue on a ps3.
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Konami of America, Inc.
- Part number: 20121
- Description: Recently, every other car game has wanted to keep your head under the hood. At long last, here's a racer that gets your focus back on the wheel. ENTHUSIA - Professional Racing uses a new technology called the Visual Gravity System (VGS) to convey a true sense of G-force while maneuvering at breakneck speeds. This is a killer first for any racing game, and brings you closer than ever to the thrills experienced by racing drivers. A powerful car in motion can be awe inspiring, as the driver taunts the laws of physics to maximize performance. ENTHUSIA features true-to-life physics to further make it all feel real. As you race, on-the-fly telemetry info is fed back to you, detailing tire and engine performance among other crucial data. And with variable weather conditions you'll soon respect how true-to-life physics factor into your game. The ENTHUSIA experience is expanded to included hundreds of cars from 40 famous manufacturers, and lets you race on real tracks from around the world - plus some of Konami's grueling fictitious ones for extra challenge. If you really want to sup up your car, ENTHUSIA's stage-based tuning allows for personalized car upgrades, but skilled driving always remains the key. Approachable gameplay for novice drivers yet challenging for experts, ENTHUSIA - Professional Racing is a racing game that will appeal to players of all levels.
Product Basic Spec
- Platform PlayStation 2
- ESRB rating Everyone -
- Genre Games - racing, Games - simulation
- Elements Simulation - car racing
- Number of players 1-2 Players
- Connectivity Live Aware
- Difficulty Medium
- Learning curve About a half hour
- Offline modes Competitive
- Online modes Competitive
Game
- Developer Konami
- ESRB Everyone
Manufacturer info
- Konami of America, Inc.
- Manufacturer profile
- Browse Konami of America, Inc. products on Shopper.com
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- Website: http://www.konami.com/
- Address:
1400 Bridge Parkway, Suite 101, Redwood City, CA 94065-1567 - Phone: 650-654-5600
- Fax: 650-654-5690
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