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: