The series, based on the manga – and subsequent anime – of the same name, has long been an arcade institution in Japan, but mixed reviews of the latest iteration had left some worried about Extreme Stage, which is essentially a port of Arcade Stage 4. While many of the faults prevalent in its arcade forebear remain, Extreme Stage offers enough to make it a worthy purchase to PlayStation 3 owners in search of an arcade racing fix.

For those uninitiated few, Initial D tracks the rise of Takumi Fujiwara, as he progresses from mere Tofu delivery boy to one of the most respected racers on the winding country roads of Mount Akina, in Japan's Gunma Prefecture. Extreme Stage delivers the entire length of this story through the main single-player experience, which takes the form of a series of one-on-one challenges against increasingly difficult opponents on a variety of mountain courses.

While the early races are nothing more than a formality, the difficultly quickly ramps up to the point where only faultlessly executed, razor-sharp drifting will be good enough to progress to the next opponent. Restarts are a given for a game originally designed to gobble up 100 yen coins, and for a good while players will be more than content to do stages over as the game does everything it can to keep the player hooked.

Perfectly fitting Eurobeat blasting away in the background, engine whirring and tyres screeching as your car takes a seemingly impossible line through a tight hairpin bend and comes out the other side unscathed, there are few gaming experiences as exhilarating as Extreme Stage. The close nature of the one-on-one battles keeps tension high and it is incredibly satisfying to edge a victory by mere-inches to animated yelps of derision from your defeated opponent.

Extreme Stage draws the player into an almost trance-like state, willing them just one more try to get the perfect line through those three consecutive sweeping hairpins that weren’t quite performed correctly last time around. It is addictive to the highest degree, and while its grasp on the player’s consciousness is firmly held there is little better arcade racing action to be found this generation.

Eventually, however, there comes a point where one particular opponent proves just too insanely difficult to defeat; the controller is put down, the player is snatched away from Extreme Stage’s grip and transported back to the real world. A couple of days later they may return, refreshed from time away from the game, ready to inflict defeat upon their nemesis - only to find that the magic has disappeared.

Suddenly, the Eurobeat that provided such an enticing, pulsating rhythmic backdrop to the racing sounds embarrassingly cheesy, the up-scaled, last generation nature of the graphics comes to the fore, and the overly nervous handling model starts to grate. Absence certainly doesn’t make the heart grow fonder when it comes to Extreme Stage, relegating it from the heady-heights of arcade perfection to a competent, fun racer with some noticeable flaws.

Chief among these is the aforementioned handling model; overhauled for Arcade Stage 4 and proving unpopular enough that Sega moved quickly to bring out Arcade Stage 5, and with it a more weighty physics engine. The cars in Extreme Stage feel like they are sliding across ice and there are times where auto-pilot appears to have been engaged mid-drift, allowing little room for manoeuvre once the drift is in motion. While this is not an issue in the fairly simple earlier stages, as the courses become tighter and more windy, players could feel entitled to have a little more control over their car, especially considering the depth of control that the earlier entries in the series afforded players.

The best players will still rise to the top, but there is precious little of the sense of discovery offered by the handling models in the earlier arcade versions and their PS2 and PSP ports. The older titles all had a variety of tricks and techniques that learned over time could make all the difference in shaving a tenth of a second off a best lap-time, and with that lost, Extreme Stage’s longevity has to be questioned, even in the realm of time trial competitions.

That said, it would be foolish to suggest that Initial D is not a quality arcade racer, despite its faults. Coming from any other publisher Extreme Stage would be a breath of fresh air, one of the few quality Japanese arcade racers to have seen release on the console scene since the start of this generation of hardware. However, when you are dealing with Sega, and their history of superb games in this genre, it is pretty clear that players will expect a slightly more polished experience.