Jet Set Radio HD marks Sega's most successful Dreamcast re-release, at least from a technical perspective. Devotees to the original will be excited to hear that all but one of the songs originally featured in Jet Set Radio are present in this HD remaster. There's a minimum of tweaking, save for its new widescreen presentation - though it would have been nice to see some updated textures as well. It's a testament to Jet Set's execution that even 12 years later, it looks even cleaner than it did on the Dreamcast. Everything is bright, slick, and mostly playful. It may not have been the first game to push the modern idea of stylized cel-shaded graphics, but it was the first to do it properly. extreme, but Jet Set Radio's aggressive visual presentation mitigates that. Ordinarily, a local police force treating incidents of graffiti like an insurgency in Fallujah would seem. In turn, you'll want to explore each level to collect enough paint to pull off the longer tags and to learn where you'll want to focus first if you want to finish each level in time, to say nothing of racking up big points and placing high up on the new leaderboards. Some tags can take a great deal of time spent standing in one place while performing ever-more complicated swipes of the analog stick, which is almost impossible amidst a hail of tear gas. The police presence serves to give Jet Set Radio HD more depth than it would have otherwise, forcing prioritization of targets. As you tag more and more spots, the police response escalates, from dudes with batons to tanks and helicopters. Your goals vary from level to level, but generally involve skating around a city landscape, tricking off surfaces to collect cans of spraypaint used to tag targets spread around, while avoiding the police. Set in a futuristic alternate-reality Tokyo, Jet Set Radio HD sees roving gangs on high-tech skates battling for turf via full-contact tagging. Squirrely controls, camera catastrophes, and nonsensical level design make Jet Set Radio HD a better memory than game. While the flash and style of Jet Set Radio HD remains untouched and unvarnished by a dozen years of progress, the rest of it can't stand up to scrutiny. Nostalgia has the side effect of high expectations though, and Jet Set Radio HD just can't meet them. Unlike Sonic Adventure or the arcade hit Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio HD is the chance for many to finally play a game they've only heard about. This was remedied somewhat with 2002's Xbox sequel Jet Set Radio Future. It's a game that almost everyone has heard of, but I think few have actually played. Jet Set Radio was part of Sega's onslaught of new properties with an emphasis on flash and style during the second wave of Dreamcast software, but it might be one of the more obscure. The publisher has emphasized how hard it's trying to get things right this time, and for many, it couldn't have chosen a better game. Jet Set Radio HD is the latest remaster in a string of Dreamcast "hits" to see new life on download platforms, but Sega has been insistent that they've learned its lessons. Jet Set Radio HD is everything the original was, but time hasn't been kind to the stylish Dreamcast title.
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