Formula Suzuki Hayabusa Time Attack gameplay (60fps)
Usually, most of the games I play here are of games I'm familiar with in some regard. That includes stuff like City Crisis and Nickelodeon Party Blast, games I found out of boredom and bizarre interest. This I bought purely because I didn't know what this was or what it was based on.
Developed for a Japanese competition by automotive company Suzuki (which, for my US/Canadian viewers like myself, left the two countries in 2013), this... demo (effectively) lets you race an open-wheel Hayabusa-powered car around two race tracks. You would get a code at the end of each time trial for entry into said competition online, which presumably entered you into some contest that you would win.
So with all that said, what exactly is this game built on? The answer is both straightforward and weird. It's built on Edit Racing (エディット・レーシング, a Simple 2000 series title that proudly proclaims that it was put onto a DVD for the low, low price of... 2000 Japanese yen), a racing game developed by Yuke's - the same one that did a ton of the WWE games.
Unlike Edit Racing, this demo was thrown onto a CD, which is all the more hilarious given that the base game being on a DVD was an actual selling point of the game. It wasn't atypical for a demo of a game to be on a CD otherwise.
This really isn't the first - or the last - racing game that would end up being recycled for automotive manufacturer purposes. Gran Turismo would have quite the storied history in that front starting with their partnership with the Netz Toyota dealership networks (which spawned a playable Gran Turismo 3 demo and a Replay Theater demo), while Advan Racing would be retooled into another Netz Toyota-themed game called Netz Toyota Racing. Even the relatively obscure Enthusia Professional Racing would throw its name into this hat, with a relatively obscure demo developed for Subaru which would allow you to drive the then-new hawkeye Impreza WRX STI around a few of that game's tracks.
But this is certainly one of the weirder recycling-of-game manufacturer games, all things considered. Oh well, I couldn't really get a grip on how the car drove in here, so enjoy some mediocre gameplay.
