We must have missed the part of "The Fast and the Furious" when Vin Diesel and company wagered their women on illegal street races while we were fast-forwarding through the DVD (the only way to watch TFATF), but that's probably going to be the most memorable part of 3DO's Street Racing Syndicate. Oh sure there are plenty of other features like detailed real world racing environments in Miami, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, but it's all pales in comparison to the things you'll do to earn your street credibility in SRS. Developed by veteran racing game developers Eutechnyx, Street Racing Syndicate is a racing sim with realistic physics designed to bring the world of illegal street racing to home consoles. With no sign of Infogrames' The Fast and the Furious, SRS may have an inside track when it arrives for the PS2, Xbox and GameCube this Summer.

The game's Street Mode will serve as the career mode where you're thrown into the role of an up-and-coming driver (aren't we all) trying to earn his street cred. Credibility is earned through winning races obviously, but having the tightest rides and tightest stable of girlfriends is also factored into the mix. In Street Mode, your PDA is the non-racing interface and its here that you'll access your in-game email, calendar and web-browser. Email messages from girlfriends and competitors will be huge because the game's producers claim you'll have instances where you'll have to choose between entering a street race and taking your complaining girlfriend out for a night on the town. There are consequences to each decision. If you take your girl out, she'll stay happy and in your corner, but the fellas will write you off as a punk bitch who's afraid to race. Your credibility takes a hit, but not as much as it would if you lose your girlfriend by choosing to race instead of spend time with her. Showing up to a street race with no honeys on your arm limits the quality of races you can enter since you're obviously not good enough to have any groupies, so who wants to race against you anyway.

If you want to go even higher stakes than betting your girlfriend (and who in the hell wouldn't?), you can bet pink slips on your races. It's a good idea to have a backup ride in the garage otherwise your Street Mode career could end suddenly.

The calendar tells you when and where the upcoming illegal and sanctioned races are taking place. The sanctioned races are few and far between over the course of a month, but it's here that you'll be able to wager your girl against a competitor's girl. If you win, you'll get to watch a filmed video segment of your girl in a naughty outfit shaking her ass to contemporary tunes. It's all very similar to what we saw in Acclaim's BMX XXX. Should you lose the race, you'll get to see a short abbreviated clip of your rival's girlfriend doing her thing. But the majority of the races will be illegal street races for dozens or hundreds of dollars that you'll need to buy everything from upgrades, to new cars, to entry fees and travel expenses as you shuttle to Miami, LA and Philadelphia.

The web-browser is where you'll buy and install licensed aftermarket products for your car. Exhaust and body kits are among the parts from companies like Flowmaster and C West that you'll be able to order --at real world prices-- and have delivered to your garage. The interesting twist here is that some parts, like body kits, can take a few days to arrive and a couple more to install, so you'll have to take this into account when you're looking at the calendar scheduling races. Some parts like tires can arrive in a day and be installed in the same day, just in time for a big race the next night. Other more cumbersome parts will keep that specific car out of commission while your mechanics hook it up. Again you'd better have a backup.

The plan is to have more than 20 licensed import vehicles from manufacturers like Toyota and Honda, but with intention to include real time damage physics, there's a chance we'll just have to make do with look-alikes. The cost of the vehicles, like the auto parts, will reflect real world pricing, so you'd better pile up those $200 races mighty quickly if you want to purchase the better cars. The girls in SRS are licensed as well and represent a cross section of the import car magazine cover model industry. That is, the 18 total girlfriends you'll be betting and winning and ogling in video clips in Street Racing Syndicate really are illegal street racing groupies (the racing's illegal, not the girls...we hope) from the Southern California area. Hell, we've even been showcasing them one at a time over on cars.ign.com. As a matter of fact, you can check out Tila right now and look forward to winning, betting and losing her in SRS in a few months. Once you get to know these ladies on IGN, you'll see just how valuable a piece of two-legged bikini-wearing currency every one of them can be in a videogame.

Continuing with the theme of realism, the tracks in SRS are all specific segments of the cities mentioned above that have been cordoned off, but unlike Project Gotham Racing you can leave the tracks and go exploring from the get go. When you're racing east through the Hollywood section of LA, you'll notice House of Blues and comedy clubs along the Sunset Strip, but when the race course makes a right turn on Crescent Heights, you can choose to continue down Sunset and see some more sights. You'll lose the race, but you'll get to explore another few miles of Los Angeles on your own.

The physics of the cars in SRS are super heavy so bending a corner will require some pre-planning. Drift racing will be a valuable skill to develop in SRS since many of the racing circuits will be surprisingly tight laps with few straightaways. One element of danger thrown into the illegal street races will be the law-enforcement presence. At any point during an illegal race the cops can show up to bust up the party and you'll have to make an onscreen selection to stay or run away from the cops. Staying means continuing on the race course until you're inevitably caught. Penalties for getting caught may include your car getting impounded and losing any illegal aftermarket parts you may have purchased. The severity of the penalty will vary, but your credibility amongst the racing crowd goes up if you show you're not afraid of one-time. Running away, will open up a new shortcut in front of you --this is why they model the whole city-- and it'll be up to you to lose the cops yourself on the city streets. Since all of your competitors will run away when the cops show up, you don't gain any credibility points when you split, but you do keep your car and all of it sparts.

IGN will have plenty more on Street Racing Syndicate, including more photos of the naughty naughty groupies in the weeks and months leading up to the game's release or until we get our own original video footage of them. At which point we'll focus more on them and less on the game.

 

We recently had a chance to check out Street Racing Syndicate, the multiplatform street racing game that may be released this summer. 3DO reps brought the E3 build of the Xbox version by to give us a better look at it and shed some light on the game's status. For those unfamiliar with the game, Street Racing Syndicate sets out to provide as accurate a re-creation of the street racing experience as possible through the use of licensed cars, locations, and models such as Sasha Singleton, Francine Dee, Natasha Yi, Cheri Roberts, Flo Jalin, Kaila Yu, and Aiko Tanaka, who are well known on the street racing scene. The game is being developed by UK-based Eutechnyx, which cut its teeth developing a host of racing games for the PC and PlayStation. Most recently, the developer shifted its focus to the latest batch of consoles with titles like Street Racing Syndicate and Big Mother Truckers.

Street Racing Syndicate will feature an assortment of modes for you to race in, with the street mode serving as the game's centerpiece. The street mode will put you in the role of a new racer easing into the street racing scene and trying to make a name for himself. The mode will play out over the course of several virtual months and challenge you to enter races in Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia and earn cash, prestige, and new cars on your way to the top.

The game features a scalable racing model that will offer an accessible arcade-style experience or a more sim-oriented, technical race, depending on how you tweak settings. The tracks will be open-ended and let you take whichever route you'd like to the finish line.

The graphics in Street Racing Syndicate are coming along, and they feature a nice amount of visual polish on the licensed car models, which will reflect any damage sustained while racing. The city environments are large and offer fairly accurate modeling of their respective streets. You'll see lighting put to good use during the races, which take place at different times of the day. Although the build we saw was early, the game's frame rate is running at a respectably smooth and speedy pace.

While development on the game is still progressing, the big question now is its future. Eutechnyx is continuing its work on the game, which should be completed this summer, but 3DO is no longer in a position to publish the title, so the UK developer is currently looking for a new publisher. We'll have more information on the game as it becomes available.