The problem with D1 Grand Prix is that, aside from the last point, the other two are either incredibly difficult or impossible to read. That is, this is one of the most unforgiving racing games we've seen in a long, long time, and its difficulty means that you'll be fighting against the game's driving mechanics rather than utilizing them to slide wildly through turns.

One problem is that the cars, regardless of which one you choose, have almost no feeling of weight. When you hit a turn it seems as if you're sliding on ice. You rarely ever get a sense of the car losing traction or re-gripping the road, something of utmost importance in a stylistic racer. It's really hard to tell if your car is about to slide off the track or not until it's too late, and generally speaking, if all four of your tires slide at all, you'll slide off the track and into a wall. It's either all or nothing here - there isn't a whole lot of in-between.

While you can, and must, learn to play things very safe, you'll be penalized for doing so more often than not. In fact, the game's entire scoring system is completely whacked out. For the first run of any race, you go at it alone and get three attempts to put up your best score as you attempt to hit the top 16 places in order to advance. For every round after this, you'll race two rounds - one with you in the lead and the CPU following, and then the other way around.

The scoring is screwed up in numerous ways. Firstly, if you so much as touch the grass a tad bit, you lose 100 points immediately, sometimes multiples of that. This means that if there are five turns on a track and you nail four of them but happen to slightly overrun one of them, you'll likely wind up with a negative score. Oddly enough, if you crash into a wall and lose your bumper you're only knocked 50 points, while flipping your car onto its roof suffers no penalty at all until you hit the grass.

In the rounds where you go at it with another car, things get even more confusing. If you run into the other racer, which the following car will do to the lead car more often than the other way around, you'll lose 100 points. Well, supposedly, since sometimes the car that's not at fault gets docked points. On more than one occasion, we took off straight down a track at the start, not moving left or right, when the opponent car would shift over and hit us and cause us to lose massive points. On another occasion we skipped a turn, intentionally crashed into the AI opponent and it lost something on the order of 200 points. To make matters worse, the computer drivers don't really try and avoid you or slow down if they're coming into a turn faster than you are, meaning they'll slam into you fairly often, and at that point it's a crapshoot as to who'll lose points.

To make matters worse, there isn't really any sort of difficulty ramp in the game. When you choose a series, you can pick a car from one of three classes - Beginner, Expert and Professional. The problem is that even if you pick a Beginner-class vehicle, the computer will still pick whatever it wants, meaning that it'll outperform you in every challenge. Not only that, but the Beginner vehicles are so underpowered that you'll often be penalized for going too slow as they can't accelerate fast enough out of a turn.

The one reasonably cool aspect of D1 Grand Prix is its simplistic singleplayer setup. Rather than having an elongated career mode, you can compete in any D1 championship series between 2001 and 2005, or create a custom championship of your own. Since this is intended to be a skill-based game, this setup works better than a full-blown career mode in that you can try (but likely fail) to improve your skill as you compete in small championship after small championship. Some folks may prefer a more full-fledged career mode, but this is a nice change of pace.