Street Racing Syndicate, originally a 3D0 property, has been picked up for release by Namco with a bit of developing by Eutechnyx. The market for street racing games may be getting a bit crowded, but hey, a fun game is a fun game, especially with a bit of clearly non-intentional humor.

SRS features both real-life cars and realistic damage, which seems to be generally unheard of in racing games because of various contract stipulations that car companies love to include. There are some hot cars, too - Mazda RX-7 and RX-8, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII, Nissan Skyline, VW Jetta, Subaru WRX, Toyota Celica, and the old-school Corolla (AE86 for the Doriftoooo crew), and plenty more. The cars are well modeled, and have a large selection of available cosmetic changes. Maybe the decals get a bit blurry, but overall the cars still look darned fine. The environments look alright, too, with lots of neon lights and the shine of wet asphalt (which may be a bit overdone, actually). There are 50 cars it seems, but some of them are just variations of the earlier models.

There are tons of upgrades and changes that can be made to each car - nitros, tires, engines, spoilers, and horrifically gaudy 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS-inspired decals and neon undercarriages. If it's your thing to make your car look as classy as a bright pink and blue Hot Wheels car that changes color in warm water, go right ahead.

There's an Arcade mode for getting into some races quickly, but the main game (Street mode) is much more fun. The player can cruise around and look for challenges, sanctioned races, or girlfriends. That's right. My favorite feature in this game is picking up girlfriends (real-life racing models!) by doing their goofy challenges. You can then store the girls in your warehouse. The misogyny is delicious. Whichever girlfriend you roll with will give the go signal for races, show up in pause menus, etc. You can unlock videos of them shaking their booty, too. Be sure to share this with your parents. I heard you could take them out on dates or wager them in races (ahahahaha!) back when it was a 3D0 property, but it looks like those features may be gone. Too bad.

The other, less girlfriend-oriented challenges are mostly one-on-one races with large sums of money wagered. That's the idea - you're gonna need a lot of money to fully upgrade your cars and collect every car in the game. If you qualify for some of the Sanctioned Races, you can place wagers with the other drivers in addition to taking home the usual prize money. Challenges of all sorts are spread about the game map, which is a combination of cities vaguely based on LA, Philadelphia, and Miami. One nice feature is a map that shows exactly where challenges are as well as the repair shop, warehouse, and dealership, plus the ability to hop to them instantly. It might be a good idea to forego this convenience every now and then so you can learn your way around some of the corners - most of the races happen right on the same streets. Random people driving around can be suckered into challenges, too.

The AI is usually easy to beat. In fact, the only truly challenging parts so far have been a couple of the girlfriend challenges, and a lengthy run from the police (you have to obey speed limits when not in a race). If you find it too easy, it might be worthwhile to try to master drifts or other techniques that maximize your "respect" points. Street cred is important, apparently. Respect points can be earned by doing various tricks and such - braking drifts, jump drifts, etc, are each identified with a wacky combo counter, along with close calls, leading races, etc. They can be strung together in combos, which is a bit weird and funny to watch. The physics seem to be fairly well grounded in reality, so it's not quite like Burnout or RUSH in that respect.

Overall, if you love 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, or love making fun of it, you should get along pretty well with this game. It's probably more desirable to get it for another system for the network modes, but it's still a fun game by itself.