Why Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune is probably a waste of time

     The place you go to with friends to have fun after school. Fighting games, rhythm games, and some carnival-ish games are just some of the different types of games you would find in an arcade. But one type of game genre has a reputation or infamy like no other. Racing games, or more specifically, the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune (WMMT) series. Developed and published by Namco, WMMT is an arcade racing game based on a manga of the same name (Wangan Midnight), with its first version of the game released in 2004. Wangan Midnight was inspired by The Midnight Club, which was a group of racers infamous for illegally street racing on the Bayshore Route, also known natively as The Wangan.

     Now that I have told you guys the backstory behind the series, I assume you guys can already guess what your mission is in this racing game. There are 2 game modes, Story (player vs. enemy) and VS (player vs. player). The story is pretty much a retelling of the Wangan Midnight manga and a way to upgrade your cars. Vs is a gamemode where 4 players can battle it out in a race. It all sounds pretty normal, right? Nahhhh. WMMT is an arcade game, so you must pay for every round of the game. That still sounds perfectly fine, right? It costs 15k rupiah for only 1 round of WMMT, which is a problem because this game is really expensive to play. In the game, to upgrade your car you have to beat 79 levels in the Story Mode. So to fully tune your car, you have to spend 1,185,000 Rupiah.

     You might be thinking to yourself, Whoa, that's a bit much for an arcade racing game, and you'd be correct. This is just one of many problems this game has, like the sweaty player base. But even with all of that, it is still a fun game to play with your friends. I only play once every few months with some other guys, and it has always been a blast. So in conclusion, everything has its positives and negatives, and it is totally fine if you feel the need to spend at least 1 million Rupiah to get good at a racing game (not targeted to anyone specifically).