Driving Emotion Type-S

You know a game is good when even the fucking demo reel glitches the hell out and cars start floating aimlessly through the deep void.

...That happens when you play it emulated though. It sucks. You have to download a very specific version so it works as intended. Anyway, when the game does work is... pretty floaty and way too responsive. It's common to just lose control of the car randomly too when in automatic mode. It's a shame, since it seems kind of cool with all the car licensing and customizing options.

But still with all its buggy glory, the control feel it's all over the place. Revolutionaty in some mild aspects; nowhere near good.

Driving Emotion Type-S is the worst racing game ever made. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing may have been abysmal. but at least it had novelty. All that Driving Emotion Type-S has to offer is agony. Honestly, I was an idiot to play this in the first place. I chose to play the Japanese version after reading a review that called the game "impossible."

But that person's wrong. I beat Driving Emotion Type-S. I unlocked every single car and track. And all I felt after doing so was emptiness. I've played a ton of racing games in my time: from arcade classics like Pole Position and Daytona USA to modern simulators like Race 07 and Gran Turismo 6. There is not, and probably never will be, a single racing game as bad as Type-S.

The game as a whole was designed to be a contemporary to simcade racers like Gran Turismo, a series that had yet to debut on the then-new PlayStation 2, in regards to both presentation and gameplay. It fails in both regards miserably.

The car selection is okay. There isn't much in the lineup that you wouldn't see in other racing games. The track selection is extremely weak. Outside of a couple real circuits, the game's fictional courses are cheap imitators of Gran Turismo courses like Special Stage Route 5 and Autumn Hill.

Middling content package aside, the game truly falls apart once you actually get to drive a car. While not impossible, the handling in Driving Emotion Type-S is so horrific and nearly unplayable. The only steer in the game is oversteer, with even slight nudges of the analog stick or D-pad sending you flying around corners and into walls. On the plus side, you never have to really learn the driving model, because the AI has about as much of a grip on it as you do. It's depressing when the best way to win in a racing game is simply to hug walls. It is absolutely the worst driving model in any retail game; not just racing games. Even shovelware PS2-era action games had driving segments that handled better.

There's not much to say about Driving Emotion Type-S. What little potential it had as a semi-realistic racing game is shattered by physics and controls that are simply abhorrent. Stay far, far away, unless you're going for a complete collection or are morbidly curious.