A brief interlude to talk about the game featured in the last video which also happens to be my second favorite Arcade game of all time (Outside Crazy Taxi) - Initial D Arcade Stage!





Originally released in 2002, the arcade game was really popular in Japan, and for a brief moment there, it was popular in western countries as well. In many ways, the game was Sega's spiritual sequel to Sega Rally.

I probably owe a good part of my JDM obsession to this game, because as a teenager I stumbled across it in an arcade and instantly fell in love. I continually returned after school and university to replay it, and it was my version of experiencing the ‘arcade culture’ that I was otherwise too young to get involved with in the the 1990s.

At the time I had no idea what Initial D even was, but fast paced drifting around mountain tracks in Japanese cars with thumping quirky eurobeat music and a force feedback wheel with a manual shifter you would slam gears around to make tight turns, had me memorised. Each track was fairly unique and there was a quasi story mode full of opponents you had to defeat, each with a interlude, challenging you to races and mocking you if you lost.





It even had a feature where it would print magnetic cards, so you could save your game progress, and as you got further you could unlock various improvements for your car that was also saved to the card.




I eventually discovered it was based on an Anime / Manga series, and that led me to import the DVD from Hong Kong - because that's what you had to do in those days.

The arcade series has continued over the years with many installments and upgrades, but sadly they all but disappeared from my city about 15 years ago. I don't think the later games ever got any English industrialisation.

But they steadily remained popular in Japan and other Asian countries - at one point there was a setup in Tokyo Sega Joyopolis that had real cars on motion platforms! One of my regrets is that the first time I was there, I didn’t know it existed. When I finally went to Joyopolis in 2023, it was long gone.





I did get to try out version 10 in Japan that has all sorts of modern features - but for me, I'm forever chasing that heroin high of trying to replicate my experience with versions 1/2/3 in the arcades from my youth. Those versions ran on the Sega Naomi 2 board - aka the same hardware that was in the Dreamcast.

They only released home versions of the game in Japan, which never got an English translation. The version in the video is ‘Initial D Special Stage’ released in 2003 for the PS2, running on the PCXS2 emulator.





I actually own this on my PS2 + I imported it from Japan back in the day and purposefully bought a wheel and modified the PS2 to run imported games - this is how much I loved this series - and was so disappointed with the lack of feedback / translation of feel from the cruddy PS2 wheel that I gave up on it pretty quickly.

A number of years later when I went to Japan I bought the then newish, PS3 version ‘Extreme Stage’ which was based on a later arcade game, but I never quite gelled with the updated physics and gameplay.

Fast forward over a decade or so and emulation tech got better and I had various successes setting up a Naomi 2 emulator to run the original rom and with lots of faffing about with wheel drivers and force feedback modifications, I was able to get the game working again as I remembered it. This is somewhat of a bi-annual ritual of mine, but it gets harder and harder as new versions of windows come out, my wheel drivers are out of date / I replace my tech with more modern stuff and the emulator stops being supported.

This time around, when tooling around with different emulators and wheel drivers for the other games I've featured in this Let's Play, I decided to go back to the PS2 version - and thanks to modern wheel configs and emulator graphical improvements I can get it looking and feeling really good with widescreen and force feedback.

Incidentally the race featured in the video with the MR2 was part of the ‘Legend of the Street' story mode, and he's a hard bastard to beat. I legitimately cheered at the end - because that recording was the first time I was able to beat him with this setup.

You may notice around the 2:39 mark he magically appears in front of me on a corner and suddenly has a huge lead.

That is because, in pure Initial D magic car-assery, he takes a shortcut and dives off the cliff to gain the lead. This is straight out of the anime, and one of the reasons I love this doofy game is they go out of their way to replicate this stuff.





Thankfully I was able to pull some magical car-assery of my own. Though I had managed to get ahead of him, he would have overtaken me on the final straight if I hadn't wedged my nose in front of him and forced him to push me across the finish line.