GTI Club: Supermini Festa! Game Sample - Wii
156Happy Valentine's Day!
For our last Wii upload for a while, we exit with an obscure nugget procured from the vault of Konami - "GTI Club: Supermini Festa!". Unbeknownst to most, this obscure Wii title is part of an even more obscure series of games that originated in Japanese Arcades back in 1996 and had limited overseas exposure. To make matters worse, the PS3 game (GTI Club+: Rally Côte d'Azur) and PSP game (GTI Club Supermini Festa!) were released in 2008/2009/2010 as a download-only game and later pulled from the Playstation Store, making it VERY hard to obtain beyond purchasing a used system from somebody who already has the game or game sharing (unlikely). What this means is that this Wii title is the only physical home release game in the series, and it's not exactly the easiest game to find either. My advyse? Get this game now if you're curious before it gets too expensive.
In general, "GTI Club" is a series of Arcade-style racing games that featured good graphics/sound for a time and free-roam racing where players could sometimes create their own shortcuts through stages. While all three of the main games were released in Arcades, the final game was released and expanded for the Wii and PSP (though only in Japan). The PS3 game wasn't a new entry in the series, but an HD remake of the original 1996 game. While the final game's racing levels aren't quite as dynamic and crazy as the previous two games, it still encompasses the spirit of GTI, and while the Wii game isn't naturally as clean as the Arcade game, it's a modestly decent-looking Wii game (at least compared to the mountains of shovelware) with a pretty good soundtrack. It's an old-fashioned arcade style racing game (time limits and all) but with a lot of unlockables and gameplay modes to keep things somewhat interesting.
Rather than explain all the modes in detail, I'll put it like this: the game is divided into two main portions - Arcade and Quest. The Arcade portion is just that-- you get to play all the stages and mini-games without the structure of the Quest mode, which is good if you want to play with your friends. The problem is that you have to play the Quest mode to unlock a fair deal of content to use in the Arcade mode. Quest Mode has you play Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced aspects of the various stages by sectioning off the stages and opening up new routes and areas the more you advance. In addition, various goals must be met by meeting different conditions which can award you with bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals (getting all gold or platinum is no easy feat) which unlock a bevy of new cars, upgrades, and vehicle parts or skins you can put on different cars. The cool thing is that you can also play Quest Mode with friends too, and all these modes accumulate "Mileage". Mileage is basically like experience points in a typical RPG and when you get enough, you unlock new features or your car levels up and improves its stats. Another cool thing is that you get to allocate how your levels are distributed, but ultimately you want to max out every different car. The mini-games are pretty fun too; from bomb tag to prize grab to even soccer, the game ensures that there are things to do other than race.
With all this and an MSRP of $30 and FREE DLC given away to help promote it, it sounds like this game could've succeeded... or at least got more attention than it did. Well, the game isn't all buttercups and rainbows, but poor reviews from the media didn't help either. The biggest issues with this game are the A.I. and physics, two key components to almost any game. The A.I. in this game is unbalanced -- really easy to beat in most races but unusually aggressive in most mini-games (especially the tomato-throwing mini-game). The physics could have also been tuned up; while it is an arcade racer, some crashes have unrealistically steep penalties while others have almost no penalty at all, and the "traffic jam" missions have various blindspots that make them more irritating than they should be. Additionally, there are odd areas that offer speed boosts when they shouldn't (allowing you to go beyond top speed). A few extra stages also would've been nice... and the loading is unusually long for this kind of game. Still, when everything is said and done, you definitely get your money's worth and it is perhaps a little underrated.
This is a video of the game in action, showing various aspects of the game. For some reason, the first race is a little laggy on the HDPVR2 -- I can attest that the game itself has virtually no slowdown (if it's something you take into consideration). Enjoy.