Pick a meter, any meter.
The bulk of the game lies in the story mode. Players take on the role of a budding jockey (who apparently went to the races as a youngster, and loved the idea of receiving flowers on top of the podium. Hmm.) fresh out of ‘jockey school’, with dreams of being a horse racing legend. Graduating alongside the player are three other rivals – all of which are overly arrogant and annoying. The player can choose which trainer they want to associate with, getting first preference on their horses at race meetings. Players can also seek out their own rides at race meetings, so you aren’t confined to the one stable. Choosing is an art form in itself, because there are countless horses, each with their own unique racing style to perfect. There is a surprising amount of depth here. Outside of the story mode there is a trial race option, and that’s about the extent of it. Oh, there is also a rather nifty tutorial mode, which is quite comprehensive, and something players will need to use extensively if they want to succeed.
Without this tutorial mode, one could be forgiven for hitting the eject button and throwing the game disc in the bin after the first race, because the assortment of different on-screen meters – most of which aren’t labeled – is overwhelming. Taking centre screen is the speed meter, which, staggeringly enough, depicts just how fast your horse is going. High tech, indeed. To the left is a stamina bar, which seems to deplete awfully fast. You’ll need to slow up, or hold your horses, so to speak, (see what we did there?), if you want to be able to make a run at the home stretch. However, pulling back on the analogs and slowing the horse down causes the horse to lose motivation. This in turn affects the dial to the right – the horse’s potential for speed. Potential is sort of like a back-up stamina bar – if there’s life left in either one, your horse can still keep going at top speed. If they both deplete to zero, it’s all over. Then there’s the matter of choosing a lead leg. Go for too long on one leg, and the horse tires out faster. Phew. There’s so many things to keep track of, it’s more overwhelming than being exposed to an episode of According to Jim.
The pre-race options. Pick your horse, if you can figure out what all that means.
By contrast, controlling the horse is a deceptively simple affair. Pushing both sticks forward will ‘drive’ your beast, making it go faster and eat stamina. Pulling the sticks back will slow it down, knocking the motivation out of your poor four-legged friend. If you want to go really fast – and chew stamina like a piece of Extra – you have to rock the sticks back and forth, in a tricky motion that’s hard to get the hang of. Pushing the sticks to the side will steer it. You can also whip your horse if that’s your sort of thing, and it will occasionally make it go faster – sometimes it will just annoy the horse, and it will slow down. And, really, aside from a few other more advanced techniques, that’s about it. It sounds easy, but it’s incredibly tough to balance all these elements and get good at it. Apparently, the game has a joystick attachment which, inexplicably, is supposed to make the game feel authentic (yeah, right – holding a control pad, riding a horse, what’s the difference?). Of course, we weren’t sent this with our review copy – but, judging by the image in the media panel, it doesn’t look like it would make a whole lot of difference.
If you have the patience to stick with it though, G1 Jockey 4 should last you a loooong time. Just getting competent at the game is a tough challenge in itself – actually becoming good and mastering it will take forever (and an awful lot of sedatives to keep you from tearing your hair out, we’d imagine). The story mode is quite comprehensive too, and not something anybody will be ripping through in a short amount of time. There’s also a versus mode, but the chances of two players of a high skill level being in the same room at once are about as likely as there being no more Mario Party sequels, so it’s one best left for single players only.
Two players jockey for position.
Visually the game is competent, if not particularly exciting. Horses look quite realistic though, and probably have the best horse animation we’ve come across – not that that’s much of an achievement. Jockeys bounce around on horses like rag-dolls, as you’d expect. Courses are somewhat dull – but that’s just like the real thing, really. If there’s a major issue here, it’s the ‘cut-scenes’. Basically, during the story portion of the game, up to three cardboard anime characters appear on the screen up against a relevant backdrop. When the text they’re supposed to say appears on screen, the other characters fade. In the era of high-budget cut scenes, this is rather underwhelming. It’s an entirely superficial thing, obviously, but it does not at all add to the racing atmosphere the game is trying to create.
So, G1 Jockey 4, then. It’s a game aimed at an impossibly small niche market – so small, you wonder why it was even translated out of Japanese. But, what it does, we have to say it does well. The horse racing appears to be rather simple, but is actually ridiculously complex. So complex, the already microscopic niche that want G1 Jockey 4 will probably be halved when they actually spend an hour playing it, and do nothing but lose repeatedly. To sum up in a sentence, if you like the idea of being a virtual jockey and think you can stick with it, this is your game – everyone else, stay well away. Common sense, really.
. My dad would like it 
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