Ridge Racer

"Another generic racer and another agitated Doodleheimer never makes any good times."

I’ll come out and say it right now. I didn’t like Ridge Racer, and I’ll tell you why later. But first, some background. Namco decided to make a generic racing game for the arcades just for the hell of it and for money. It became successful in the arcades, and Namco decided to port it to Playstation in it’s early life. It became successful there too. And since then, it has spawned many sequels across three different platforms.

That game was Ridge Racer, if you weren’t able to figure it out, then you’re pretty stupid.

Ridge Racer is your run-of-the-mill arcade racer, only this time it’s easy as hell. There is nothing to keep you playing, unless you like aimlessly driving across a racetrack cruising by cars for the second time in three laps. They didn’t need to make three laps, you can just as easily beat each race in one.

What really steams my broccoli is that there is one course, and they decided to make a jillion variations of it.

“Let’s make it backwards a few times”
“Let’s make the race at night a few times”
“Why not put them together a few times?”

That’s probably what happened, and then they smoked pot the rest of the time.

And the car selection is pretty pathetic when the second-best car there is, is available from the start. The best car is, obviously, the car the President would use if he were a race car driver. Slick black, fast, and easy to control, although I doubt I would have it any other way.

The graphics are very little to gawk at, they don’t even have that hot trademark Namco girl in this. Besides lots of pop-up and crudely drawn objects, it also is a little agitating seeing the same friggin’ buildings each lap. And Namco has no shame when it comes to plugging other games of theirs in this. On one building, at night, a bunch of lights form Pac-Man on a building, and there’s also a Galaga mini-game at the beginning.

The sound effects are your standard racing-game fare, vroom vroom, and the like. Except for the announcer, who only says crap when you don’t run into a tough curve, which he then says “Teach me how to drive like you!” Namco has two options for you on the music. Either some weird techno stuff no one gives a crap about, or you can play your own music CDs in there. But, sadly, that’s screwed up too. The game chooses to play the CDs each at a set time for each CD, with only six different times. No track selection or anything. And when it’s the end of a track, it doesn’t go on to the next. How screwed up is that? But if you must have your own music, I suggest putting in Green Day or Bad Religion.

This game is not fun, unless you’re some weak little kid who plays easy games to feel big. The only slight trouble anyone could possibly have with this game is trying to out-race the black car, and that’s easy, since it’s near impossible to run into anything in this game.

The controls are as slick as oil on ice. It’s easy to control the cars, and it’s actually hard to drive into anything. That pretty much defeats the purpose of a racing game. Racing games are supposed to be so hard you’ll want to kill yourself. I wanted to kill myself while playing this game, but for entirely different reasons.

Doodleheimer runs down the scores!

Gameplay – 4
Graphics - 3
Control - 6
Sound - 3
Fun Factor - 3

Total Score - 38/100

This game is cheap for a reason. It’s a piss-poor run-of-the-mill racing game, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone over the age of five.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/14/03, Updated 01/14/03