As a big racing game fan and an avid sports car driver (currently a 2004 STi), I was intrigued at the prospect of trying something new. As much as I love Gran Turismo, something other than a classic racing/driving simulator is more than welcome. I also thought I'd be very good at drift racing right away. I knew all the concepts going in and have done my fair share of drifting in other games, whether it was the goal of the game or not. I was in for a rude awakening.

The learning curve is very steep. So steep in fact, you can't even start a career unless you complete all the required tutorials and trials. These are similar to a set of license tests but are absolutely necessary to get you ready for competitive drift racing. Aside from the different gameplay, there are rules that I wasn't immediately familiar with. You have to come to terms with these rules before you even think about racing.

D1 Grand Prix is a bracket style tournament, where drivers compete directly against one another each round until only one driver is left standing as the champion. Each round a pair of drivers square off on a subsection of a racetrack. One driver is given the lead and the other must follow. Points are given for style (how long you drift, the angle of the drift, the speed throughout the drift, etc.), and points are lost for mistakes (missing the apex of a turn, not drifting, leaving the track, hitting your opponent, etc.). The goal of the driver in the front is to be stylish while keeping your speed and hitting the apex on turns. It is the job of the driver in the back to get as close to the leader as possible, dipping the car's nose inside of the lead car in turns without touching the opponent. After the first run the drivers switch positions and run again. Judges determine the winner of each heat.

Once you have the rules down, it's all about the execution, which is no joke. Successfully drifting around the track is hard enough by yourself. When you get into the competition, you can't really afford any mistakes. In the beginning, this is impossible. There such a hard line between sliding straight off the track and not drifting at all that presents a challenge that I honestly believe not every gamer will be able to overcome. When you do finally start nailing the turns, it won't be consistent, and if you aren't consistent, the computer will beat you every time. I believe that the physics are in place to make this game successful, but the subject matter is foreign and much more difficult than regular racing.

Even if D-1 was the greatest drifting simulator ever made, it's still wrapped in a very bare bones package. Career races just move from one track to the next and subsequently one season to the next. Although it follows the actual D-1 event pattern, it offers nothing else. There are a few cars to unlock, but there are plenty of cars available from the start, and I didn't notice much of a difference from one car to the next. Honestly, it feels more like an arcade game than a home console game that you'd play over and over again.

The graphics are ok, maybe a step or two behind Pro Race Driver. It has some damage modeling, and pretty decent textures on the sponsored racecars. The environments are pretty blah and suck some of the life out visual presentation. The voice work seemed really dynamic at first with a full commentary team ala football and basketball games, but by the second race they were already repeating their very sparse set of lines. It became terribly annoying very quickly. I guess there's no way around the squealing of the tires in a drift racing game, but holy hell I wanted that sound effect removed from PS2 forever.

At its core D1 Grand Prix is successful at what it wanted to achieve. It's captured the feel and complexity of professional drift racing. As a complete video game entertainment package, it's rather mediocre. It's a niche aspect of racing, and the whole game revolves around controlling and uncontrollable car. Even if you stick out the long and harrowing learning curve, there's very little incentive to continue around these short track competitions.