Online Functionality
While MSR did not allow network racing, various features can be accessed via the Internet option in the main menu:
- Time Trial: A time attack with a specific car, course and weather condition. Best laps can be saved as ghost cars within the trials themselves. A separate VMU file is created which can be passed onto others to compete against.
- Speed Challenge: These are time attacks on set courses from each city; Market West II (San Francisco), Parliament Street South II (London) and Higashi-Dori Kita II (Tokyo). They can only be raced using the VX220/Opel Speedster cars with automatic gears. Until March 2002, players were able to upload their best times to a online ranking within Dreamarena (see below).
Players registered to Dreamarena/Seganet could also access a special MSR microsite using the built-in browser. It contained the following features:
- Speed Challenge Ranking: you could enter a best time for each course or a total best time.
- Global Kudos Ranking: total Kudos scores for each player. The Kudos leaderboard was not active until 5 Jan 2001 due to score bugs within the first PAL editions.
- World Time Trial Ranking: the top 10 best lap records for each course. Players competed by uploading their Time Trial files. These files could then be downloaded by others to challenge.
- Ghost Attack: Pre-set ghost cars from various courses to compete against.
- Driving tips and links to the MSR messageboard within Dreamarena.
The site also hosted nine 'New Time Trials' billed as "races created by Sega on an exclusive circuit that you can download and challenge" however these circuits were simply the 'Challenge' tracks (Shibuya Challenge, Westminster Challenge, Pacific Challenge etc.) already present in the game. Reports suggest the top 10 ranking for this feature was never implemented.
The microsite and rankings closed in March 2002 with the demise of Dreamarena.
Read more about this topic: Metropolis Street Racer