Written by: Rik
Date posted: October 28, 2022

2005 was slap bang in the middle of a period in which I rather neglected my (very old) PC and experienced most contemporary titles of interest through my PS2. Despite maintaining a reasonable awareness of the throwaway racing games of the era, I must admit that I had never heard of this particular effort until relatively recently, although upon booting it up everything about it certainly screams ’00s PS2 game’. Street Racing Syndicate is as ‘2005’ as watching The O.C. on a small kitchen CRT with a single can of Foster’s bought from the corner shop [stop boasting about what a cool guy you were in your 20s, will you? – Ed.]

It also, as it turns out, comes with a side-order of 00s attitudes to women, which are arguably the main distinguishing feature of the game. Other similar street racing titles are hardly innocent in this regard, of course, with various actors and models appearing in video sequences that imply that they would like you so much more if you just did some good driving. SRS is however rather more Route 1 in its approach, largely ditching any attempt at narrative in favour of inviting you to impress up to 18 ladies to the extent that they will then perform awkward dances for you in various states of undress (no nudity though – it’s all good, clean, family fun, for ages 12 and up).

I’m a sucker for the kind of dumb arcade racing that Street Racing Syndicate provides, though, having covered most of its contemporaries already. So, while I might ideally prefer not to play a game in which a polygonal woman approaches and says things like, “Hey baby, I got a thing for bad boys and fast cars”, that seems to be the hand that I’ve been dealt. So back I go again to ‘the streets’ in search of ‘respect’.

This site has been around for so long that the often-cited quest for respect on the streets started as a reference to the Need for Speed games attempting to add some contemporary edge and cool but now feels as up-to-date as skateboarding while wearing a sideways-facing baseball cap and shouting “Cowabunga, dudes!!” And while this correspondent will happily admit to lazy overuse of tired clichés and phrases over the years, the fact remains that lots of these games do talk quite explicitly about earning respect on the streets, probably because Paul Walker actually says in The Fast and the Furious: “I lose, the winner takes my car, clean and clear. But if I win, I take the cash, and I take the respect.”

He was talking there about pink slip races (or DVLA V5C log book races, as we call them in the UK), in which competitors stake their vehicles on the result, which aren’t featured in SRS, although they were a key part (and a fatal flaw in the design) of the similarly respect-focused Juiced. But the general context is the same, and you won’t be surprised to learn that in Street Racing Syndicate, your task is not to earn respect by improving your moral standing through unquantifiable principles such as professionalism and strong personal ethics, but by ticking over a giant high score via winning races, performing skids through corners, and convincing a series of women to get into your car.

While Respect Points are the main currency of the single-player career mode, you will also need actual currency too, to buy a vehicle and upgrade and repair it. The main method of acquiring respect is through Crew Meets, a series of three street races (either laps or point-to-point) against a maximum of three opponents, which involve an entry fee, the option to place bets against fellow racers on the outcome, and a final reward of 3000 points. With the exception of a few off-street events, victory in each race earns only 750 points, with the remaining 250 acquired through various drifts and other manoeuvres along the way. If you crash, you lose points, as well as incurring damage that will remain in subsequent races and impede performance until you finish the series and can get your car to a garage.

A supplementary way to earn respect is by impressing potential girlfriends, who will set you some kind of brief timed challenge, successful completion of which means they will agree not only to drive around with you but also come and live in your warehouse until you need them again. For more cash, there are also one-on-one Street Challenges dotted around the city, although to be honest you get more dosh from just repeating the crew meets, which – as we’ll see – you will have to do plenty of anyway.

Like a lot of these games, SRS gives you loads of explanation of the various mechanisms in its career mode at the outset in a way that means you’ll immediately forget them, while also failing to really get into the nitty gritty of how you actually make progress. In the interests of saving you a bit of time and/or letting you know what you’re getting yourself into, I’ll say it now: if you want to get to the end, then you should grab as much respect as possible as you go, and even then you’re going to have to go back and repeat much of what you’ve done.

It’s a point that can be easy to miss, as early progress is a somewhat of a procession if you know what you’re doing, and though you might acknowledge that Crew Meets require a certain number of points and a cash ‘ante’ to enter, neither seems like a massive obstacle to overcome if you follow things in a logical order. When it comes to the total required for the last few, and the final one in particular, though, you may be forgiven for thinking it’s a bug, laughing incredulously, and then weighing up whether you can really be bothered with it all. (For more info, see our guide here).

Repetition is part of all such games, however, and I ultimately came round to the opinion that Street Racing Syndicate has no more of it overall than rival titles, just that it approaches things slightly differently. While progress is generally serene, there’s a severe punishment for rage quitting during a Crew Meet, as you lose your ante and any wagers, as well as any progress through the three race series, so you tend to have to wear any losses and battle through. The flip side of this is that the ludicrous rubber banding and last lap defeats of the likes of Need for Speed: Underground aren’t so much a feature here. And so tackling an overstuffed number of similar races and endless restarting of each are replaced by the need to really nail as many events as possible.

It helps that the driving is quite nicely calibrated, too, despite some iffy handling moments with one or two of the earlier cars. By the time you’ve upgraded a bit, and assuming a generally high tolerance for driving around in circles, it’s a refreshing change to be focusing on precision in terms of avoiding minor scrapes and effecting skill moves as part of the race rather than being on edge about how the cheating AI will punish you for any indiscretion. They’re not idiots, by any means, and if you mess up badly, you will get punished, but if you go back and do an easy race with your massively overpowered car, you’re not going to be overtaken by a VW Jetta on the final corner just because you crashed once.

It’s also good if/when you realise that different cars in your armoury can really help you eke out extra points later on, with some being better at drifting than others. I say ‘if/when’, though, because the game doesn’t give you an awful lot of guidance, and if you’re just after the best car and glibly assume that a Nissan Skyline will be it (it is) then you’ll be stranded far from the number of points you need to complete the game. And if that final unlock is taking the piss rather, the event itself is easily completed once you can access it, suggesting some kind of miscalculation somewhere along the line.

There are other, non-career mode arcade challenges as well, but it’s hard to believe that you won’t be sated by the main event, with the ability to unlock bonus cars an insufficiently tasty carrot to draw in anyone but the most obsessive of completists. The prospect of taking on the final Iron Man challenge, in which you need to win 12 races in a row, for example, didn’t particularly appeal to me.

And so now to the dancing ladies. At the risk of overcomplicating things, but not wanting to get them wrong, I spent a long while upon completion of this game looking at the Wikipedia entry for sex positive feminism with an increasingly confused look on my face. However, I’m going to stick with my initial instinct that this aspect of SRS is, at best, an embarrassing, dated and tacky feature that doesn’t reflect well on anyone involved in its inclusion.

Presumably, from a game design perspective, these bits were designed to break up the repetition of the main racing: after the initial wooing, your polygon girlfriend will become real and dance around for you in her clothes; you then need her to accompany you to a couple more successful Crew Meet victories to unlock further videos of her dancing around in her smalls.

If you lose at any point, then your unimpressed squeeze will go off with someone else and you’ll need to win her back by attracting a new girlfriend and winning a Street Challenge. (Only bad driving will annoy your girl, not the fact that you have many concurrent partners, or that they are all forced to live together in the same warehouse along with your cars). The videos themselves have something of a hostage situation vibe to them, and the jiving takes place to a selection of 00s banging choons on the soundtrack, one of which relies heavily on samples of Tony Blair and William Hague arguing in the House of Commons. So if watching women dance from side to side while listening to the former Prime Minister say “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” repeatedly is your particular thing, then you’re in luck.

(The sample is taken from a 1998 Commons debate during which, showing remarkable prescience regarding Conservative policy on Europe, Blair also said to Hague: “if the Tories were in power today, we would not have an ally anywhere, no influence, no authority, no ability to get our own way… The policy of your party is determined by the headbangers you have surrounded yourself with.”)

One contemporary review of Street Racing Syndicate suggested that a superior alternative would be a copy of Project Gotham Racing and some porn. Which is probably still the case. In fact, the ‘bonus points for flashy driving’ system on offer here is basically derivative of the PGR Kudos system, one of many bits and bobs borrowed other similar games, some of which – like the brief and inconsequential police chases – are included to no great effect. However, certain dubious aspects and other frustrations aside, there’s actually a pretty solid racing game here, if you’re into such things, and it all stands up pretty well.

See also:

• SRS Guide: Unlocking Nitro Xtreme Series 3