Tokyo Xtreme Racer is a novel throwback to classic PS2 racing games like Midnight Club, and I can't get enough of it

Just as the Gnostics believe that earthly pleasure cannot compare to the heavenly vision, no racing game has ever been able to capture the exhilaration I felt from playing stone-cold arcade racing classics like Midnight Club or NFS Underground as a kid. But the newest game in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer franchise is somehow pulling it off, making old-style racing games seem brand new once again.

Tokyo Xtreme Racer is a series developed by Genki that's been around since 1999, when it was known as Shutokō Battle in Japan and Tokyo Highway Challenge in PAL countries. It's not, honestly, a series that I knew about until this year – until, after an 18-year gap of major releases, the simply-titled Tokyo Xtreme Racer hit Steam Early Access.

Switching gears

On start up, you pick a car from one of three starting models, watch some extraneous if entertainingly overblown story stuff. Then you're let loose on Tokyo's Shuto Expressway, a twisting leviathan of tunnels, bridges, and fenced-in roads, bedecked on all sides by billboards and high rises.

You cruise around and, when the mood takes you, you can come up behind another car and flash your headlights to initiate a race. The races themselves are known as Spirit Battles, with the aim being to reduce your opponent's spirit by crashing them into things or by streaking ahead of them. Once you get over a certain distance ahead of them, their spirit starts to drain. This is, as far as I can tell, a unique way to do races – something like a hybrid of a racer and a fighting game.

While you can race just anyone (including, for maximum hilarity, some poor person driving a flatbed lorry just trying to do their job), you won't get much money from beating them. To get more money, you'll need to race other racers, who are usually in a team of some sort. Beat enough of a team, and you can race the team's leader. Each racer has a bizarre nickname that's usually tied to their personality outside of the race (you get a bio for each racer after beating them). Some who I've beaten include Great Finance, Indigo Helmswoman and Raging Choreographer. It's like racing against the collective crew of Mother Base.

That, I think, is the handle. Its sense of sheer joie de vivre, the immaculate silliness of everyone on the Expressway being happy to race at any time, shooting across the Rainbow Bridge as the Tokyo Tower glints lustily in the distance. It feels like I'm playing a better-looking version of something like Daytona USA or Outrun, something capable of evoking a sense of place, of wonderment, better than any other medium.

I've yet to even touch on the other kind of car game, whose spectre hangs over Tokyo Xtreme Racer like a petrol station attendant with one eye on the clock: the tuner game. Games like Need for Speed: Underground or Midnight Club, where making your car look as silly as possible is as important as actually winning races. Thankfully, the customization options run deep in Tokyo Xtreme Racer with upgradeable parts by the fistful and many options to make your car look daft. My current main car is one of the starters, a Toyota Sprinter Trueno. It was a flaming pile of garbage at first, but I've managed to extinguish at least some of the flames, while adding a zebra-pattern decal to my bonnet, coupled with the tricolour stripes from the BMW M1.

My project, however, is to take my second car, a Daihatsu Copen, and turn it from shitbox to hitbox (bear with me). You see, I've always loved the idea of sleeper cars, cars that look run-of-the-mill but can outrace a muscle car. The Daihatsu Copen, out of the box, is a terrible car. It's incredibly slow, and it's also, in my view, kind of ugly. But the game has made me love this absolutely terrible car, because I know it doesn't have to be this way.

I know it doesn't because there's a boss who drives one who absolutely smokes me whenever I've challenged them. I want to turn this car from a stain on the Expressway's carpet into a feared monster, and I think the game will genuinely let me do that. I've already made it look stupid, with a yellow and pastel blue colour scheme, it just needs the internals to match.

This game's many great aspects combine to genuinely make the old feel new again. It's a refreshing experience after years of racing games that either take themselves too seriously or feel that the setting is secondary to the driving. In developer Genki's Steam Early Access statement, the studio says that it wants the game to be in early access for around four months, which would put the full release sometime in May or June. I'm curious to see what more the team can add, aside from the expected additional story, rivals, and vehicles. For now though, you can catch me tearing up the tunnels by Haneda airport in my trusty Trueno. See you there?

Cult classic racing series returns 18 years after its once-final entry on Xbox 360 to 95% overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews