Auto Modellista

Auto Modellista (アウトモデリスタ, rough Italian for "car designer") is a racing game developed and published by Capcom, first released on Sony PlayStation 2, and subsequently, on Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Xbox. It was Capcom's first driving game for fourteen years since the arcade game F-1 Dream, but they had previously distributed Ridge Racer 2 for the US market and both Test Drive 5 and Test Drive: Off-Road 2 (developed by Pitbull Syndicate) for the Japanese market.

Description
The game marked itself apart from others of the same genre with cel-shaded graphics, which gave them a hand-drawn and cartoon-like appearance. Despite its unique style, the game suffered from poor handling dynamics, and ultimately turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. In 2003, to address the problems cited by the Japanese and European PS2 versions, Capcom reworked the game and added American cars initially for the North American market, titled as Auto Modellista: US Tuned. This was Capcom's attempt to sway North American players into buying the game, but it still suffered from the same handling dynamics of the first edition. The US Tuned version would be ported as a GameCube and Xbox game, with the latter due for release in Europe on April 2004, but distributors eventually decided not to honour, predicting sales of the game were going to be poor. The game was superseded by Circus Drive (known as Group S Challenge outside Japan), but Capcom has not been involved with driving games since.

Gameplay
Auto Modellista attempts to be a very technical racing game, with an immense amount of available parts and settings for the selection of cars provided to the player. Various aspects of each car can be tuned, allowing the player to tweak the performance of the car.

In the Garage mode (the main single-player mode), the player is granted the ability to select one of four tire types which affect road grip in regard to the weather conditions on the race track (for example, the "Semi-Slick Tires" provide maximum speed and grip in dry weather, but suffer in rain). Other options include brakes (which determine braking efficiency), suspension, Turbines, Mufflers, Computer (determines the car's ability to accept upgrades later in the game), the engine, "Final Gear", and Weight Reduction.

Auto Modellista's customisation options also extends to visual enhancements, allowing the player to choose from many different color combinations, hood and spoiler types, plus the ability to add badges, stickers and even create license plates.

A large aspect of the game was its online mode, with onlines races supporting up to 8 players. This functionality (and many of the game modes relating to it) were removed from the original US and European releases, but was added back into the US Tuned editions of the game. The online mode of Auto Modellista has been terminated, and cannot be used in any versions of the game.

Reception

 * E3 2002 Game Critics Awards: Best Racing Game
 * GameSpot E3 2002: Best Games
 * GameSpot E3 2002: Top Games