Team Vision allows you to see the top three racers in the world across the rival team or teams.Īnother regretful decision has been to infect Ridge Racer's once pure, intrinsic reward structure with extrinsic RPG-esque levelling and car mods.
There are no tournaments, no spot events, no clear incentive to keep playing other than improving your best time in Time Trial mode.
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Instead, you simply attempt the three tracks included in the game (or six if you claim the Gold Pass DLC for free before March 31st - see 'Ridge Racer Extended', left) as single, one-off races over and over, earning money and winning points as you do so, before being deposited back to the menu screen. There is no single-player campaign to work through away from the meta-game.
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There appear to be no tangible benefits or rewards for being on the winning side at any given point, and there is no narrative set-up for the rivalry of the four teams.Īs such, Namco's gamble in placing the full weight of Ridge Racer's emphasis on this online meta-game is a crippling mistake. But where the idea fails is in the lack of clear incentives or objectives. The concept of warring online factions is nothing new to games, although it's rarely been applied to the racing genre. Every time you complete a race, your winnings are uploaded to the servers and the overall rankings of the four sponsors are displayed as they jostle for pole position. Rather like the second Steel Battalion, the aim of the game is to convert wins to points that feed into a grand global total for your side. This choice cannot be changed and locks you in to a community of other players who made the same choice. You begin by choosing to side with one of four sponsors. It is a racing game slotted within a social game framework that fails to engage or inspire on even the most basic levels. While the first game in the series was a product of its time, an arcade racer designed for insta-thrills to gobble up 50-yen pieces, this new Ridge Racer is a product appealing to its time.
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But while that riotous yet precise handling remains, the surrounding game structure is anything but orthodox, simple or, tragically, good.Īcquired upgrade kits are shared between all five of your cars.
So it is that a Ridge Racer accompanies the arrival of the PlayStation Vita. That economical DNA has served the Ridge Racer series well: a leaning towards simple thrills that has allowed Namco to launch a new version alongside the release of many new pieces of video game hardware since.
Today, Polyphony Digital and Turn10 toil for months recreating the intricacies of real-world racing car physics and handling, but Ridge Racer allowed us to soar around hairpins, drifting majestically, with an economy of logic that stunned contemporary game makers. It revealed that the handling model for the vehicles was written in just a handful of instructions. Overnight, the code became famous amongst game developers. Not the code in the sense of a pirate version of Namco's seminal arcade racing game: rather, the source code, the written instructions of logic and maths that fired its primary-coloured cars around the track. Somebody once leaked the code for the original Ridge Racer onto the internet.
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