Konami brings Street Supremacy to PSP

We've already been blessed with a few great PSP racing games, but anything that brings a new spin to the popular wheel-based genre can't be ignored.

Enter, engine purring, Street Supremacy. Developed by Genki and distributed in Europe by Konami, the most interesting thing about Street Supremacy sounds like its single-player Team Battle mode.

This mode sees the player joining a team and competing against rival factions for control of 15 areas of Tokyo.

The battles are split into single duels between individual racers and Five-against-Five Team Battles for control of that area. Players can choose who to race, strategically selecting their rivals from the player roster to try to seize territory from them. The Team Battle even encourages competition within the teams – winners are upgraded in their team ranking, and can eventually challenge to be team leader.

Yes, we're effectively in The Fast and the Furious territory again (most recently visited on PSP by Juiced: Eliminator), but we've hardly tired yet of the relatively fresh street racing genre, after some 20 years of doing racetrack-based laps.

Disappointingly though, the two-player mode sounds fairly mundane. Here you simply race one of your customised vehicles against another player over the local wi-fi in a one-on-one battle. There's no grand battle competition.

As you'd expect from a street racing game, you can modify and respray numerous licensed Japanese cars to try and get an edge. The game's Nissans, Mitsubishis, Subarus, Toyotas and Mazdas can all be enhanced with new exhausts, paint jobs and body-kits, which all promise to help in cutting lap times to the bone.

Less usefully but more impressively, vinyls and lighting can also be employed to enhance the cars' aesthetics. Just the thing for a day of local wi-fi racing in Essex.

If you think Street Supremacy sounds well-named, you've not long to wait until you find out. Hugely delayed since we first reported on it, it's finally due out towards the end of next month