Now Testing In Taiwan: Fast Beat Battle Rider

Well it seems that Namco is not the only company with an upcoming motorcycle racing arcade game on their hands (Dead Heat Riders in case you missed that). Taiwanese company Saint Fun is currently testing out a game in this category called Fast Beat Battle Rider in Taipei, Taiwan, here are some of the details.

Saint Fun is not a household name type company but they have created some original content (in addition to a few knock-offs) including a racing game called Fast Beat Loop Racer which is their attempt at an InitialD type game. The new motorcycle game is staged in the Fast Beat ‘universe’ if you will so in addition to the straight-forward arcade mode there is also a story mode where players can build up and customize their character, all saved to a data card.

The game uses a FullHD monitor and as far as the play goes it includes scenes apparently inspired by a motorcycle chase scene from The Matrix of zipping along between trucks and cars. There are several handling types of “motorcycle, Harley Davidson (can they do that without a license?), motocross, and scooters” to choose from and six cities such as Shanghai, Xi’an, Beijing, Osaka Tokyo and Taipei to race in.

As far as finding this game outside of Taiwan or China I’d say there is a possibility of that, albeit not a large one. Taiwanese arcade companies often seem eager to get their games into the West when they aren’t a music game of some kind but the problem is without support setup outside their home region it makes it difficult to push the products elsewhere. Also we don’t see cross-region licensing on a scale like we used to when Japanese and American companies would do that all the time. That seems less likely to happen with something like a racing game when everyone has their own two or three racers they push per year.

[Via Sloan Aphorisms]