Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions
- October 21, 2002 16:07 PM PST
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The Xbox tech demo that could finally gets ported to those other two systems. Thing is, it's changed so much, fans might not be able to recognize it.
When Activision announced Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions for the PlayStation 2 (and later GameCube), we all had a general idea of what to expect. It'd be a safe port of Bunkasha Games' original, it probably wouldn't look quite as good as the Xbox one did, maybe there'd be some new cars, that sort of thing. Lord, how naive we all were.The PS2 and GameCube versions of Wreckless, looking at them from the surface, reminded me of the days when companies like Acclaim would make their games on the SNES first and then try to cram them into the Sega Genesis later on. The PS2 preview version looks...well...like a PS2 port, with less graphic detail and blurrier environment textures than the Xbox original. What's worse, the GameCube previewable (screenshots below) has all the same visual problems?Activision ported it straight from the PS2 version instead of adding any of the Xbox game's fancy filters and lighting and such.
But enough with the bad news. The graphics are only half the reason why this new Wreckless seems like a whole 'nother game, after all?the other half lies in the controls. The Xbox version had impossibly sensitive steering that'd throw your car diagonally across the freeway if you so much as looked at the controller the wrong way. Not so here: all the cars respond much more reasonably, and that infamous "dockside photo shoot" mission is made twenty times easier by this alone.
Another addition, this one a bit odder, is hood-mounted rockets. No, really. Strange as it may seem to Xbox fans, most Wreckless missions now give you a supply of rockets to blow up yakuza cars and other stuff with. Weird, eh? This switches the focus of many stages from pinpoint car bumping to simple aim-and-fire action, which does make things easier overall, but it'll be quite an adjustment for anyone who's played the original.
Speaking of missions, they've been doubled?you now have 40 of them to play though, most of which run along the same lines as before. When you beat 'em all, you'll unlock the "free drive" mode that we only wish was in the Xbox version. Thanks a ton, guys.
The GameCube version of Wreckless is due out November 13 in the U.S.; right alongside the PS2 one, actually. Stay tuned for the full review of both.
Note: All screens are from the GameCube version.
