It's new to me: Zusar Vasar

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Zusar Vasar is one of those games that most people would pick up, play for a few minutes, and then put it right back in the box. Then possibly bury the box in a hole somewhere. It does not feel good at first. It feels bad, actually. The issue isn’t with Zusar Vasar so much, however, but with the lack of familiarity for what it’s trying to do. It’s a racing game, set in the future, except you’re not racing cars. You’re also not racing F-Zero or Wipeout-style vehicles, or motorcycles with or without guns, or anything like that. You’re racing chariots. Futuristic chariots. Futuristic chariots pulled by robot animals, which you control the speed of using the triggers on the Dreamcast gamepad.

Also, sometimes the chariots need to travel over water or fly. 

That’s not all, though! The chariots can also drift. Why can they drift? Chariots shouldn’t be able to drift. Nothing in their design says they should be able to drift! They do drift, though, if you decide to select the “Drift” over “Grip” option for how handling will work in your races, which means you have to figure out how to drift a chariot pulled by two robots shaped like animals, or else lose your races. Don’t worry about whether it’s possible — Ridge Racer’s physics aren’t possible, either, but does that stop you from mastering them?

Of course, most people did not pick up Zusar Vasar to begin with, which means you aren’t going to literally unearth any copies. Here’s how well-known this game is. It has a Wikipedia page, yes, but here it is in its entirety:

IGN reviewed it as an import title, which is miraculous when you consider how little information is contained within that Wikipedia page, and also that the developer and publisher Real Vision Inc. — sometimes seen styled as RealVision, but on Zusar Vasar’s own title screen where the credit is, it’s displayed as “Real Vision Inc.” — does not have their own. I’d love to know how IGN even heard about it in the first place, given how many games tend to slip through the cracks when they do get a regional release, and it’s not as if this was a high-profile import. Zusar Vasar has a page at GameFAQs, too, but there isn’t a FAQ to be found, and just a single user review from 2001 (though, someone did link a review to a YouTube video on the game, as well). The Sega Retro page for Zusar Vasar is only slightly less sparse than the Wikipedia one. The MobyGames page has zero (0) screenshots. Do you know how difficult it is to find a MobyGames page with no screenshots? And there are no credits listed, either! But hey, at least they’ve got the box art.

As far as anyone seems to be able to tell — and please correct me on this if you’ve got evidence otherwise — Zusar Vasar is the only game that Real Vision developed or published. Their website has a four-page PDF dedicated to Zusar Vasar contained within it — and you can still access it now thanks to the Wayback Machine — but the page hosting that PDF is mostly full of information about hardware, with links to different pages that go into detail (via Google Translate) about Real Vision’s work developing “3D graphics subsystems that aim for the world's highest performance”. Or the GA400, which Real Vision’s site (again, via Google Translate) says, “is an LSI whose main function is the calculation of polygon vertex coordinates (geometry processing), which is a key point for improving performance in high-end 3D graphics systems. The GA400, realized with completely hardwired logic, is capable of geometry processing of more than 10 million polygons per second, enabling the realization of the world's highest level 3D graphics system without increasing the load on the CPU.”

Polygons have come so far that I’d kind of forgotten that “polygons per second” is a thing that used to be measured and bragged about to show off the power of hardware. Just to give you some in-the-moment points of comparison, though, the original Playstation specs say that the system rendered 90,000 polygons per second if it went all-out detailing said polygons, and 360,000 per second with flat shading. Sega’s own estimate for the Dreamcast was between three and six million polygons per second, per the February 1999 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, while Sony estimated, at the low end, that the Playstation 2 could handle three million per second (but 16 million at the high end). So, 10 million per second sounds like quite a bit! 

This is a lot of discussion about things that are not Zusar Vasar, yes, but it’s fascinating that this hardware company laser-focused on efficient 3D technology that wouldn’t tax a CPU came in, developed a single video game, and that this single video game is this one. A completely batshit take on racing that, even for the reviewers who seemed to enjoy it, still made them feel a bit unsettled. IGN’s review doesn’t read like it’s as generous as a 6, but in the end it comes around to say it’s not a “particularly bad” game, just one they never hope to interact with again. Dreamcast Magazine awarded Zusar Vasar its highest score (8.4), while the magazine Video Games from Germany gave it a 5.0, and not out of five. Sega Retro compiled the few review scores it could find together, if you care to take a look, but the reception was safely deemed “mixed”.

Which, again, is understandable. Zusar Vasar is baffling out of the box. It doesn’t play like you’re drifting with a car. It plays like you’re drifting with a chariot. Which you are. So, it’s going to take a lot of getting used to how everything moves and reacts to your button presses and timing, and even more time than you’re thinking, because it’s not as if you have just the one robot animal to roll with or the one chariot. No, there are a whole bunch of robo animals to pick from, each with their own stats, their own pros and cons, and then the chariots themselves have differing ratings, too. Which means you need to play enough to find the kind of chariot you want to be racing, in terms of speed and acceleration and handling and strength. The animals — referred to as your “doublesteed” in-game, since you’re picking a pair of them — gives you your base rating, and then when you’re selecting a chariot, you can see how much or less of a particular category you’ll have by selecting that type. Which means you can decide to punt entirely on, say, handling for speed by combining two high-speed, low-handling types, or you can do the opposite, or find something balanced, or try to use the high acceleration of one choice to balance out the lack of acceleration from the other, and so on. 

Sure, you could use robot horses to pull your chariot. But that’s boring in a game where you could instead choose robot panthers. Or robot lions. Or hyenas. Or gorillas, or elephants, and so on. Maybe you never imagined a racing game where you could have a pair of robot kangaroos pull your sci-fi chariot around through air, land, and sea, but Real Vision did. That’s probably why they named themselves that in the first place.

So, pick your animals and the chariot they’ll pull, and then you have to learn to drive the thing you’ve built. Which requires both the L and R trigger button — one for each of the animals. The right trigger controls the acceleration of the right animal, and the left trigger the left, which means you can keep your foot on the gas, as it were, but only one side at a time, in order to take the turns you need to take at a manageable speed without careening off into a barrier or a wall or just off course. You’ve got a boost gauge that refills over time, too, and is activated with a press of the X button. You’ll have to balance using it as often as possible in order to give it maximum time to refill, allowing you to maybe squeeze in one additional boost over the course of a race, with the fact that you go fast enough after boosting that, if used at the wrong time, will send you flying off into a wall on a turn or into another chariot that impedes your progress.

The ground races are kind of the mid-range ones for difficulty. The ones in the air are genuinely pretty cool once you get the hang of them, and knowing how everything operates there, absent the ground beneath your feet/hooves/whatever, will probably make racing in the other formats easier, since it helps separate you from the idea that you are in a car. Again, you are in a chariot pulled by an elephant or a deer or something, not a car. The water levels are the worst, in the sense that they’re the most treacherous to navigate and will take the longest to acclimate to. But you’ll have to do so eventually in order to unlock all there is to see in Zusar Vasar.

You start with just three courses to choose from, but by finishing in first place, you unlock more, and more, and more, until you’ve got 21 tracks in total. The game’s championship mode will allow you to get to all of this, so long as you can earn your way to it all, but you can also just race a single race, or play in Zusar Vasar’s battle mode. Which, frankly, makes Mario Kart’s battle modes look like an organized and very polite experience. It’s just pure chaos, since these chariots with robot animals pulling them suddenly have weapons, too, and there are up to six of those chariots gliding around the track while explosions abound. You pick a normal weapon with unlimited ammo, and a special weapon that recharges, and then you hope you explode last.

For all the talk about hardware development and polygons per second in Real Vision’s other job, Zusar Vasar is low on detail in its backgrounds, and runs at 30 frames per second. Which is fine and all, but this isn’t the graphical showcase you might have expected when you read about the kind of stuff Real Vision was up to otherwise. It does the trick, though, and you get to put a pair of robot buffalo in front of a chariot that can fly or race on water, so really, you just come off looking greedy if you’re saying there’s not enough here for you.

That all being said, Zusar Vasar is certainly not going to be for everyone. Which means there’s just enough of it to go around for the weirdos [complimentary] who it is for. A copy of Zusar Vasar in the case will run you over $100 on the secondhand market as of this writing, but this is the Dreamcast we’re talking about, so surely you’ve already come up with some kind of region-unlocking, burned-disc workaround for that. Or maybe you’re fancy, and have an ODE in your Dreamcast so you don’t even need to bother with the whole disc thing. The point is, if you’re already at the point where you can play whatever Dreamcast game you desire without breaking the bank in 2025, then you’re also the target audience for Zusar Vasar simply because you’re still here after all this time. At the least, you should experience it. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to love it, but you do owe it to yourself and to Real Vision to play the game where robot elephants race robot hyenas in chariots that drift, sometimes in the air, sometimes in the water.

Oh, and one last thing: Zusar Vasar is already in English, even though it only released in Japan. There’s the occasional screen with Japanese characters, but everything you need in order to pick game modes or robot animals or chariots or tracks is in English, so, there’s no language barrier here or need to wait for an unofficial translation. Start your… engines? 

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