July 28, 2006
Initial D: Street Stage
Note: If anyone is looking for a PDF of the English manual, please check this post.
Lately I’ve been playing with my PSP more, but it started to get boring with only two games: that Gretzky hockey game that came with the bundle and X-Men Legends II which my friends got me for Christmas. Since I got a credit card I figured maybe I’d try to find a fun game to buy to change it up a bit. I stumbled on Play-Asia.com and found saw Initial D: Street Stage for the PSP as #2 of the top ten sellers for PSP games.
I enjoyed playing Initial D at the arcades but never really got far into it. However I did go crazy with Maximum Tune as you can see with the status of my card below:
I easily have spent over $40 on that game. I beat it once already and am just one race away from beating it a second time (sad, I know), so I figured, maybe I’ll purchase Initial D for the PSP so I could get my drifting fix.
So I headed over to Play-Asia on the 20th and bought the asian version for $40, not a bad deal for an import.
Then today it arrived and I was a little nervous about opening it. Why? I wasn’t totally sure if it would work on a North American PSP. Still I was excited, so I opened the package and there it was. An original Initial D: Street Stage for the PSP in Japanese packaging:
So I put in the UMD into the PSP and booted it up. I was relieved to see that it recognized it:
Got a little scared when I saw this though:
Turns out it was just some warning screen. Darn my lack of Japanese comprehension 
Since this game is hardly covered in any video game related site I’ve come across I’ll try to cover some of it with what I’ve went through so far.
- The game is pretty much a port of the arcade version, the gameplay is fun as the original but steering with the analog control on the PSP takes a little while to get used to
- The manual is in English! It’s really great because without it I wouldn’t be able to understand the menus
- In the arcade version there was a points system which you used towards upgrading your car. The PSP version uses a trading card system (refer to the manual on how to tune your car up, I thought that when you received the cards it automatically tuned it up but never realized my car was just as slow).
- Final note: Imported games work on any PSP
I took some snapshots of the intro which I’ve uploaded to Flickr, take a peek to see how great the graphics are:
I stroke my e-peen for this game
You also finished off the battery on my PSP.
Race you in August
I just got this game, albeit without the english manual. Were you able to find any walkthroughs for the menus or anything? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Sorry Skip, I usually check GameFAQs for that kind of stuff but unfortunately nobody’s posted anything like what you’re looking for. The manual I have translates all the menus basically but unfortunately I don’t have any spare time to compile/scan the translations and descriptions. Maybe you can leave a post in the Initial D: Street Stage message boards over at GameFAQs to see if anyone is willing.
[...] In my last Initial D related post, a fellow by the name of Skip Jenkins left a comment requesting help in finding a digital copy of the Instruction Manual for the PSP game Initial D: Street Stage with the english translations. At the time I did not have a lot of free time to scan the manual I had which was what he was looking for. However, thanks to shortstat, I’ve surprisingly found out that a lot of people stumble onto my site by googling: initial d street stage english manual or something else to that effect. Last night I was able to put aside a few minutes and take photos of the manual and compile them into a 6 mb PDF because even I had troubles locating a copy of this on the net. [...]
i was told that the game didnt come out till feb 23 is that true if it is how the hell did you get yours
@ae86drifter: If you bothered reading my post closely up above, I (as well as some of the others who commented here) got our import copies from online import game stores such as Play-Asia.com a long time ago.
[...] a sucker for rhythm type video games. When I purchased Initial D: Street Stage for the PSP from Play-Asia, they suggested that I could bundle the purchase with DJ Max Portable [...]
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