I kind of love Ridge Racer. I've had most of the games in the series from new with only Rage Racer and this added to the collection later on. As a matter of fact I just checked Wikipedia to see if I owned every Ridge Racer, and ended up ordering RR64 for the N64. Other than that, the only one I don’t have is Ridge Racer Vita - but then I don’t actually own a Vita (yet) so that would be a bit pointless.
So yeah, bit of a fan.
Why ‘Ridge Racer V’ has sat unplayed since I picked it up a couple of years ago, I don't know. I always struggle to see PS2 games as particularly 'special' though, which I know is ridiculous, but I guess that might have something to do with it.
That notwithstanding, it’s weird that I haven’t played a game I own from a series I really like - especially as it supports the brilliant NegCon controller; Namco’s proprietary device that is, for my money, the best way to play driving games that isn’t a steering wheel.
The weird thing about coming to ‘Ridge Racer V’ now, is that it takes a beat to figure out what I should be expecting from it. The Ridge Racer I played most recently was actually ‘R: Racing Evolution’, which was on the same generation of hardware, but something of a ‘spin off’ from the main series. I’ve also been playing the two PSP games fairly recently, but they would have come after this. Essentially, the most I can really pin down is this is the sequel to ‘Ridge Racer Type 4’, one of the most technically impressive games on the original Playstation, and the most ‘rounded’ game in the series.
But ‘Ridge Racer V’ doesn’t follow in the footsteps of it’s famous forebearer, moreover, this game was developed before the game introduced the boost mechanic that characterised Ridge Racer 6, 7, and the handheld ports on PSP and 3DS.
What we instead have with ‘Ridge Racer V’ is a game that, were it released today, would quite possibly be branded as ‘Ridge Racer: Remastered’.
Gone are the stories from the different teams, gone the meandering structure, and gone, most notably of all, are the vast variety of tracks.
‘Ridge Racer V’ has courses that are in a similar vein to the original game and Revolution, and as such it even seems like a step back from ‘Rage Racer’ (essentially Ridge Racer 3), and RRT4. The trackside details are fully modelled in polygons for the first time, but the event’s all take place in ‘Ridge City’ with courses created by blocking and opening routes on the streets and motorways; a far cry from the mountain trails and international locations of the previous two games.
Visually, the presentation of all this is pretty good, and must have been amazing as a PS2 launch game, but there are changes to the audio that didn’t work for me.
The announcer is an attempt at the ‘DJ Atomica’ style of radio commentary, but his canned lines and mispronunciations are only ‘so bad it’s good’ for a couple of races. Additionally the electronic music, that is core to the Ridge Racer experience, has been bulked up with some horrible metal nonsense that really doesn’t fit the bright vibe of the series.
The vehicles have never looked or sounded better though, and the game has kept the different types of cars that evolved in series to this point, with 3 levels in two classes (Drift and Grip) and there are also engine upgrades available for the first time.
The racing is done in small groups of races called Grand Prixs. Success unlocks more Grand Prixs, more tracks, and more cars.
This is probably ‘Ridge Racer V's strongest aspect, largely due to the level of challenge on offer. There was clearly a design choice made to bring this game back to it’s arcade roots, and the difficulty curve is very much in line with that - with even a series veteren like myself struggling to get out of the first Grand Prix on the initial attempt.
I had no issue with the difficulty of ‘Ridge Racer Type 4’, but in going back to the coin-op classics, part 5 has given itself an identity - something that the series on the whole seemed to be struggling with at this time.
With this game harking back to the series’ origins, and the aforementioned ‘R: Racing Evolution’ spinning off towards more realistic racing, Namco also came up with ‘Critical Velocity’; an open world adventure game set in the Ridge Racer world, only released in Japan.
After half a decade of freewheeling, the series settled down for a while with 2 PSP games, 1 each for the 360 and PS3, and one for the 3DS, that follow the same themes and ideas, with drifting and general good performance in races being rewarded with nitro boosts. The final (for now, hopefully) effort on home consoles and PC was the horrifically bad ‘Ridge Racer: Unbounded’, a game which was clearly developed as a new IP and had the famous branding slapped on it after the fact. A couple of attempts to make the series stick on mobile devices followed, but neither are still active.
Coming before the ‘lost years’ of the franchise, ‘Ridge Racer V’ at least knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and even if it’s status as a console launch title can no longer hide it’s rough edges, there is still a lot to like and a lot of play time to be extracted thanks to the classic difficulty level.
So yeah, bit of a fan.
Why ‘Ridge Racer V’ has sat unplayed since I picked it up a couple of years ago, I don't know. I always struggle to see PS2 games as particularly 'special' though, which I know is ridiculous, but I guess that might have something to do with it.
That notwithstanding, it’s weird that I haven’t played a game I own from a series I really like - especially as it supports the brilliant NegCon controller; Namco’s proprietary device that is, for my money, the best way to play driving games that isn’t a steering wheel.
The weird thing about coming to ‘Ridge Racer V’ now, is that it takes a beat to figure out what I should be expecting from it. The Ridge Racer I played most recently was actually ‘R: Racing Evolution’, which was on the same generation of hardware, but something of a ‘spin off’ from the main series. I’ve also been playing the two PSP games fairly recently, but they would have come after this. Essentially, the most I can really pin down is this is the sequel to ‘Ridge Racer Type 4’, one of the most technically impressive games on the original Playstation, and the most ‘rounded’ game in the series.
But ‘Ridge Racer V’ doesn’t follow in the footsteps of it’s famous forebearer, moreover, this game was developed before the game introduced the boost mechanic that characterised Ridge Racer 6, 7, and the handheld ports on PSP and 3DS.
What we instead have with ‘Ridge Racer V’ is a game that, were it released today, would quite possibly be branded as ‘Ridge Racer: Remastered’.
Gone are the stories from the different teams, gone the meandering structure, and gone, most notably of all, are the vast variety of tracks.
‘Ridge Racer V’ has courses that are in a similar vein to the original game and Revolution, and as such it even seems like a step back from ‘Rage Racer’ (essentially Ridge Racer 3), and RRT4. The trackside details are fully modelled in polygons for the first time, but the event’s all take place in ‘Ridge City’ with courses created by blocking and opening routes on the streets and motorways; a far cry from the mountain trails and international locations of the previous two games.
Visually, the presentation of all this is pretty good, and must have been amazing as a PS2 launch game, but there are changes to the audio that didn’t work for me.
The announcer is an attempt at the ‘DJ Atomica’ style of radio commentary, but his canned lines and mispronunciations are only ‘so bad it’s good’ for a couple of races. Additionally the electronic music, that is core to the Ridge Racer experience, has been bulked up with some horrible metal nonsense that really doesn’t fit the bright vibe of the series.
The vehicles have never looked or sounded better though, and the game has kept the different types of cars that evolved in series to this point, with 3 levels in two classes (Drift and Grip) and there are also engine upgrades available for the first time.
The racing is done in small groups of races called Grand Prixs. Success unlocks more Grand Prixs, more tracks, and more cars.
This is probably ‘Ridge Racer V's strongest aspect, largely due to the level of challenge on offer. There was clearly a design choice made to bring this game back to it’s arcade roots, and the difficulty curve is very much in line with that - with even a series veteren like myself struggling to get out of the first Grand Prix on the initial attempt.
I had no issue with the difficulty of ‘Ridge Racer Type 4’, but in going back to the coin-op classics, part 5 has given itself an identity - something that the series on the whole seemed to be struggling with at this time.
With this game harking back to the series’ origins, and the aforementioned ‘R: Racing Evolution’ spinning off towards more realistic racing, Namco also came up with ‘Critical Velocity’; an open world adventure game set in the Ridge Racer world, only released in Japan.
After half a decade of freewheeling, the series settled down for a while with 2 PSP games, 1 each for the 360 and PS3, and one for the 3DS, that follow the same themes and ideas, with drifting and general good performance in races being rewarded with nitro boosts. The final (for now, hopefully) effort on home consoles and PC was the horrifically bad ‘Ridge Racer: Unbounded’, a game which was clearly developed as a new IP and had the famous branding slapped on it after the fact. A couple of attempts to make the series stick on mobile devices followed, but neither are still active.
Coming before the ‘lost years’ of the franchise, ‘Ridge Racer V’ at least knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and even if it’s status as a console launch title can no longer hide it’s rough edges, there is still a lot to like and a lot of play time to be extracted thanks to the classic difficulty level.
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