Ferrari F355 Challenge is a double white whale for me.

in terms of racing games, the Brutally Realistic Driving Simulator was my method of choice in my most acne-laden years for insisting that I was a mature adult - the GTR2s, the iRacings, the NR2003s, I would spend hours fiddling with these games, Logitech Driving Force in lap, attemping to convince myself that trying to understand how to operate a clutch while monitoring thirty gauges in cockpit view was the only logical step after yeeting a Minolta around all of Gran Turismo 4. in this regard, F355 Challenge ruled my mind as The Arcade Racing Game (with a console port for my hacked PS2) for people who wanted games to be hard first and fun second.

and in terms of arcade games, F355 Challenge is a massive, three-screen monument to an era that, inevitably, will be buried under ticket-dispensing mobile games ports, openly rigged rail shooters, and Konami's insistence that its music game cabinets get bigger and more packed with gacha-laden upsells. it's Yu Suzuki's ode to Ferraris and racing, written on a blank check from Sega AM2.

I've become more and more bold about chasing the retro arcade spirit in Japan, as it is astonshingly, even impossibly, easy.