https://noahsbarks.com/reviews/g-g-series-collection-plus/

I recommend reading this review at my site, linked above, for proper formatting and images.

According to my records, I have launched Drift Circuit more than any other game in G.G. Series Collection+.

It's also probably the worst game in it.

How did this happen? Frankly, I'm not entirely sure myself. I have a bizarre fascination with just how bad this game is. I'll start by describing the gameplay.

You have four menu options on start-up. These are the three difficulty modes and a fourth choice to freely race on any singular track from the game. Each difficulty mode has three tracks unique to it, and you're tasked with completing those three tracks three times each for a total of nine races per difficulty. To progress, you only need to place at or above the designated placing prior to the race's start. In the first set of three races, you only need to place third or higher, then second, then finally first. Failures are lenient, as you can always restart from the beginning of the current race until you complete it. However, there is no saving mid-series, so all nine races ought to be done in a single session.

The cast of characters. Green is unfortunately obscured by the countdown.

Nothing out of the ordinary with any of that. What is, however, is the racing style. Drift Circuit opts for a top-down perspective, which had been progressively phased out even back during the glory days of arcade gaming. I suspect this was done because it's likely the simplest perspective to design for. Isometric or third-person perspectives require at the very least consideration towards sprite scaling, whereas a top-down perspective allows all visuals to be static and consistent relative to each other.

Beyond that, the style's obscurity makes it novel, which is a plus for these simplistic games. There are five cars of varying colors competing in each race (even in the free course selection), and the player always controls the red car. The colors represent a sort of hierarchy (heircarchy?), with the cars always starting in the same position relative to their color. Red is always in the very back, of course, and silver is a cheating bastard that always starts out in front. Thus, the challenge.

And now I have to decide how to deconstruct this game's design, because everything feels bad. Drift Circuit is comedically slow-paced for a racing game, and the screeching sounds of rubber tires from cars desperately trying to make any sort of turn gives the whole experience a sensation I can only compare to if "nails on a chalkboard" got a driver's license.

I implore you to watch any footage of this game if only for a few seconds to understand what I mean, because whatever you're imagining in your head is likely too generous.

Turning in this game in your worst nightmare. Your default turn ratio is on par with a jumbo bus, and tackling any curve even at your glacial speed will give you a long enough association with the course rim for a common law marriage. There are no Koopa shells to hurl at your opponents in this game. You have an acceleration button, brake, and the directional pad. That's it.

Except for one thing: this is Drift Circuit, remember? This is how you're meant to handle the corners in the game. Unlike Mario Kart, drifting is not optional—if you aren't using it at every opportunity, your loss is guaranteed. But of course, the drifting mechanics are far from smooth. To execute a drift, you must double-tap the direction in which you're turning. Sound simple? Well, yeah. It is.

You'll notice the smoke clouds, which mean you're drifting, because there's no other effects during races.

But damn if it isn't awkward. The unintuitive controls are one thing, but getting a feel for drifting is another. In my experience, it's rarely optimal to drift your way through an entire turn. Rather, you want to use the drift's wider turn allowance to set your path forward on as much of a straight line as possible, letting up on the directional button once you've achieved such to prevent your drift from sliding you further away.

I should probably explain what a drift actually does. Yes, it increases your turn radius, but it also prevents your speed from decreasing while you turn. This is a critical distinction when it comes to the game's feedback. I'm reminded of Retro Game Challenge, which has a game in it called Rally King. It's a top-down racer similar to Drift Circuit, and it also features drifting as its main mechanic. In Rally King, performing a drift doesn't prevent your speed from lowering—it raises it. You are given a brief burst of speed for every successful drift.

Comparing the two games, Drift Circuit withholds punishment for playing well, while Rally King actively rewards you for playing well. You're maintaining a neutral state in one, and moving to a superior state in another. One is dynamic when the game is going well, the other is dynamic when the game is going poorly. It's positive versus negative reinforcement, and science has demonstrated the former's superiority time and time again. These design choices may seem insignificant at first, but it's the kind of subtle, psychological effect that makes up the difference between having fun and not having fun. To quote a wise man: you may not have noticed it, but your brain did.

Regardless, drifting is where Drift Circuit's "complexity" comes in. You should always be going top speed in Drift Circuit, since you're hardly going to be blown away by g-forces or anything. This means your drifting turn radius is fairly consistent, clunky though it may be. In essence, you have to memorize this turn radius and find straight lines through the course by beginning a drift at the right point. Obviously, "drawing a straight line" is a basic racing principle since a straight line is always the fastest path, but the level of abstraction in other racing games is done in Drift Circuit, and how literal that principle becomes is almost surreal.

Once you get used to it, it almost feels like you're controlling a fucking protractor. Courses in Drift Circuit are always completely flat. There is not even the illusion of hills or bumps in any of the tracks. You generally want to draw a straight line playing a game like Mario Kart, but discerning that isn't necessarily simple, because three-dimensional courses have varying inclines and dips that can affect the "length" of a driven line, and these can be subtle. It really is just that simple in Drift Circuit, however, which lends to the feeling of you looking over the picture, protractor and compass in hand, and drawing your perfectly straight line. The non-existent sense of speed does little to dispel this illusion. The top-down perspective means you don't have any sensation of the terrain around you zipping past. It's very weird.

And very boring. Drift Circuit just kind of flat-out sucks. That's part of why I can't stop playing it I guess. It's an enigma. I keep hoping for something to make sense to where I can see the game the developers thought was fun enough to release. But I think this is just it. For whatever reason, just like me, Drift Circuit seems to have just came out wrong.

Pictured: High-stakes thrills.

I was so desperate to crack this case that I made Drift Circuit the first game I beat in this playthrough. All three difficulties, felled by my hands. To the game's credit, this isn't especially taxing (at least, not any more than the basic gameplay already is.) Each course takes under a minute, so without any losses you're looking at under nine minutes to complete a difficulty.

Well, in theory. On hard mode I found the last two courses to be an enormous difficulty spike. The semifinal course took me over a dozen attempts, if not multiple dozens. The final, when I had hoped that the previous had been a fluke, took me well over an hour to beat. Thank god for infinite retries, but still. There was nothing that special about the tracks themselves. The silver car simply got an unbelievable lead in these two, and you needed perfect consistency and borderline simple luck to overcome it.

The luck concerns the other cars. There's five, remember? Always in the same order, each one blocking your passage to the next placing. Passing cars in this game can be positively infuriating. I should first establish that your car making virtually any contact with anything else, be it cars or walls, can completely stop your car. Emphasis on "stop." This game has no "proper" physics, and inertia does not exist. Touching anything has a high chance of stopping you entirely and entirely resetting your acceleration. This is devastating enough to where a single crash can make first place unachievable.

If the game wants to be really punishing, fine. As I said, courses are quick to complete, which makes retrying not have too much of a sting to it. But retrying only helps insofar as correcting human errors. Drifting at the wrong spot? Fair enough. But what the hell do you do when your collision is unavoidable because every other car is hugging the same inside of a turn as you are? You can't just fucking go through them like a ghost, nor can you shove them aside due to it stopping you.

This is the biggest obstacle to victory in Drift Circuit, and I still don't have a reliable answer to it. This is the reason the final two tracks took me so long to beat. What was always a problem in the game became something insurmountable once the lead of the silver car was too extreme to excuse the time I would lose from taking a turn at a wider angle. See, having to do that isn't necessarily bad. Your car has a higher top speed than the others, so once you're back on a straight line you can pass the cars. You still need enough time to build that speed though, and you only have so much once the silver car starts bribing the race sponsors to let him teleport half a track ahead.

Thus began my innumerable attempts to finagle a path to victory, and I think I found one. I think. It seems to me that the other cars follow a set, optimized path through the course. They're essentially on rails. Because each AI car has the same top speed and only their distance when the race start determines their placement, they will never overtake each other. Free of player influence, every performance of the AI should be identical.

As I'm implying, it appears the AI will change its behavior relative to the player once the player is in close enough proximity. Manipulating this is sometimes the only way you can cut down on times, as you need cars out of the way when making tight turns. The problem is that, because they're on set paths, you need to make sure you're influencing their trajectory at the right moment so that they're in the place you want when the turn comes.

After dozens of attempts on the final track, I noticed that sometimes the AI would behave in identical ways depending on where and when I approached other cars. Normally, even when you're getting close to them, an AI car won't create enough of a side gap for you to pass them before you speed up and collide with their rear or side. But if you have them start making this distance just before a turn comes up, then their new position will cause their turn ratio to be wider, allowing you to (hopefully) make a tighter turn and zip through the widened gap. To sum up my point, it's not necessarily enough to cut down on time in a race—you need to cut it specifically so that you're in the right place when you come up on another car.

Again, this level of trial-and-error isn't normally necessary. The final two tracks are just a huge difficulty spike. Your higher top speed is usually enough for you to race normally and do whatever you need to to safely avoid collisions. I suppose I should give lip service to the brake button, but I found no practical use for it. You already move so slow, so it's not like you risk crashing into a wall from going too fast. Likewise, you have plenty of reaction time. The only use case I can think of is maybe avoiding a collision while trying to pass another car (before you figure out how their AI works to avoid this scenario), or realizing you have enough time to pass them on the outside of a corner, but those situations never came up much for me even when I was still learning.

To wrap back around to the presentation side of things, the game has next to no animations. Cars are static rectangles that slide around the screen, the top-down perspective being used as justification to not even animate the wheels turning. Combined with the skidding sounds, the visceral effect is that of metal scraping against metal. I've already used the "nails on a chalkboard" idiom, but it's just so accurate. The only visual effects to speak of are the smoke trails left behind when drifting, and the brief clang and flash you see during collisions. No motion blur, no wind—nothing. "Speed" is only a philosopher's dream in the world of Drift Circuit, and you're not Plato, you're Playslow. Click here to donate to my site.

As for the music, you get a unique song for each difficulty. The easy mode music is a hilariously mismatched eurobeat sendup with an overlaid high-tempo synthesized beat that kind of sounds like a kazoo got bitcrushed. Jokes aside, it's not a bad composition. Normal mode ups the drama by underlaying a synthesizer that's at a lower pitch than the main beat. Shit's getting real. This song feels the most at home in Initial D for me. I can easily imagine it being an instrumental for a hypothetical credits song during the anime. Oddly, I think the hard mode song should maybe be swapped with the normal mode one. I find it to sound more "optimistic," which was not the attitude I had during the game's final two courses. It may be my favorite of the three anyway, due to each synthesizer melody having a constantly breaking, "staccato" rhythm—frenetic! I also have a fondness for the jingle that plays when you cross the finish line. It's very reminiscent of 90s Sega arcade games. If you know, you know. I'd link all of these if I could, but there's no OST upload for Drift Circuit on YouTube. Can you believe it!?

So uh, yeah. That's Drift Circuit. It's kind of just a bad game. I think I keep coming back to it because there's a je ne sais quoi to the quaintness of the whole experience. The glacial pace of the game reminds me of analog toys I used to love as a kid. Part of me wants to compare it to slot cars, but even those are too damn fast. Have you ever seen one of those analog racing games that have the cars move on a treadmill belt? Something like this:

Wow! Two speed to challenge!

That's it. That's Drift Circuit. Now, if I may make a more personal comparison to a toy I actually had as a kid:

Finally, a portable Mario Kart game.

This plastic crystal was one of the possible toys you could receive in your Wendy's kid's meal while they were doing a promotion around various Mario video games. The back of this square has an image replicating the North American box art for Mario Kart: Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance. In the bottom right corner was a red disc with a small indent allowing you to rotate it with your finger. The cars were magnetically stuck to the track, and they would follow along it as you rotated the magnet to simulate a race. Amazingly, that image of a banana bunch actually had a function. If a car being dragged along the track crossed over the banana, they would lose some sort of contact with the magnet, causing them to fall behind. As a kid that blew my mind, but they probably just put a thin piece of plastic between that area and the magnet. Anyway—who will win? Place your bets! Gather your chums at the elementary school playground and learn the fun of gambling with Mario!

So yeah, I kind of loved that thing. I guess I'm not the only one who realizes its value, because I took the above image from an eBay auction currently priced at $22.46. That's quite a return for your investment in nuggets. Now I'm kicking myself for not holding on to my useless junk toys until they became collector's items. And there you have it: Drift Circuit is a fast food meal toy. Come to think of it, I believe they're priced around the same amount; five dollars or so. Am I the one being unreasonable? …Nah, other games in the G.G. Series Collection are far superior—which is saying a lot.

Because I played this as part of the G.G. Series Collection, my racing days are not necessarily behind me. As with all the games in the collection, Drift Circuit has several missions attached to it that reward currency for completion. Most of the conditions are kept hidden, so I don't know all of what it wants me to do, but based on the missions I've completed, it seems that they want me to get under certain lap times. In theory, that's not too bad. But while getting first place in most courses isn't a tribulation, getting certain times may require me to manipulate the AI as described above. Not very tantalizing. All the same, I don't know if I'll be able to eternally resist returning to see my adorable bright red toy car trudge along the paper-thin track like The Little Engine That Could—because I'll eventually forget that only one of these stories has a happy ending.

Oh, and did I mention there's a Drift Circuit 2? I'll cover that in the distant future. Keep your engines running for that one.