3(DS) + 1 (week) + 1 (game) = 5(/10)
Well, it's all been happening in the world of the 3DS since WoSland decreed it relevant by deciding to get one last week. Nintendo are talking about stick-on second analogue pads, brand-new models with the 3D effect toned down, and trailing mysterious big announcements for the Tokyo Game Show that sent the beleaguered company's stock soaring.
Obviously WoSland is flattered that its Seal Of Grudging Sort-Of Approval has generated such dramatic activity, but much more important than that is the fact that my 3DS now has a game to play. So how's that gone?
Since it's apparently Namco Week here at WoSland, let's find out.
Having been warned off the very pretty but seemingly fruit-fly-lifespanned Pilotwings Resort, there was only one game in the 3DS launch lineup that this reporter had any degree of interest in paying boxed-game money for, because as far as I'm concerned there have only been two generations of videogaming: retro (1972-1993), and post-Ridge-Racer.
Ridge Racer was a pretty big deal in arcades (not least thanks to the incredible "Full Scale" model), but the debut of the Playstation port of Namco's most iconic racing game marked the one and only true paradigm shift in home-gaming history. Not only did it break ground in bringing high-speed 3D with realistic graphics to a console platform, it was also the pivot point around which home conversions of cutting-edge videogames started to become better than their coin-op counterparts. Ridge Racer was when everything changed.
Namco, no slouches when it comes to spotting a cash cow, have milked it ever since. The Ridge series now comprises at least 11 distinct games (not counting tweaked editions like the arcade "Ridge Racer 2", treating RR6 and RR7 as essentially the same game, and only including the second PSP title), and has appeared on almost every significant hardware platform of the 21st century.
Ridge Racer 3D isn't actually technically the first version with 3D visuals – apparently there's a patch for the PS3 game if you have a 3D telly – but we're going to pretend that it is, because we haven't got all day and this is already more history than I meant to go into.
In short, the good news is that the 3D effect is pretty smart, and the trademarks of classic RR are all present and correct. The bad news is that, as with the first PSP version, Namco have rushed out a half-arsed cash-in job that's light on content and high on grinding.
The first worrying sign is that GAME have already discounted RR3D savagely, despite it only being a few months since the 3DS launch and there being very little else for the machine's owners to buy. When I went in, brand-new copies were going for just £19.99 – half the RRP – so I was a little miffed only to save £2 by buying a pre-owned copy for a penny short of £18.
(You can get one for £12 delivered from Amazon, but you never know how long Super Saver packages are going to take and I didn't feel like waiting another fortnight before I had something to play.)
I resisted the temptation to jump into the saved game that was already on the cart and over-wrote it with a new profile, without even bothering to check how far the previous owner had progressed. This was probably a mistake.
A brief digression: in many ways, the N64/DS version of Ridge Racer is still my favourite. I love the courses and music and inventive structure of Type 4, and the visual splendour of 6/7 (particularly the latter, as RR6 is way too dark and gloomy for a Ridge game), and also the way that the second PSP release compiles so many of the series' high points into a single game, but RR64 is the last truly "pure" Ridge Racer.
It's the last game to use the original near-cartoonish primary-colour aesthetic, the last one to eschew the gimmicky "nitrous", it's got an excellent selection of classic and new courses, and by the later stages it's absolutely batshit-mental fast, to the point where you need almost supernatural memory and reflexes to be able to get round the track without cannoning off the walls like a bullet fired down a long and twisty drainpipe.
Not unrelatedly, it's also pretty damn hard, and it was the final fling for Ridge games that didn't treat the player like a poorly-coordinated baby.
After a gruelling marathon of menus and options, my first race in RR3D put me in a car that felt as heavy as the British Museum Of Lead Elephants and steered like a pig with four broken legs. I still managed to comfortably come first, and as a prize the game awarded me a skittish but somewhat nippier dynamic-drift vehicle, the splendidly-named Lucky & Wild Eruption.
(As ever, Ridge Racer is twice the game for having a garage of completely made-up cars.)
As you progress you unlock the option to buy new cars, upgrade your existing one or bolt on a variety of single-use boosters like nitrous charge or rocket starts, but the standard Eruption was working fine for me and I decided to stick with it, saving up my prize money in case I needed it later.
You start off in Category Four, and the main Grand Prix mode offers eight C4 tournaments of four races each. By the time my 3DS had used up a full battery charge (with only a couple of minutes warning from the first red flash to conking out), I'd won all 32 races in my unmodified Eruption, without so much as having an opponent in my rear-view mirror as I crossed the line.
In almost every race I'd been in first place by the start of the third and final lap, regardless of numerous errors that would sometimes see me powersliding up the track backwards or bouncing off successive walls to a near standstill. A combination of nitrous, the highly elastic slipstreaming and the game's extreme forgiveness of slamming nose-first into concrete at 160mph would always recover the situation, and as the 3DS sat blinking in its charge cradle I wondered how much of this there would be before the real game started.
Category 3 started off even easier. Taking the default C3 car I aced the first Grand Prix by a mile, usually being 1st by halfway through the second lap. My reward was another drift car, the L&W Evolver, which I foolishly decided to try out in the next GP.
The Evolver is an uncontrollable Teflon-tyred beast of a thing, and I spent all four races going around the tracks mostly doors-first. I still managed victories in three of the four races, and my second place in the other was still enough to qualify, but I switched to the Standard-drift Kamata RC410 for the next series and was back in Easy Win Land.
As I write this I'm 66 races into Ridge Racer 3D, with a record of 63 wins and three 2nd places. I've unlocked the Advanced GP – winning the first series and half of the second one before the battery gave out again – and raced both of the game's meagre complement of new courses, backwards and forwards. (There are a lightweight 15 tracks in all, 13 of them from previous Ridge games, plus reverse and apparently mirror variants, though only the former have shown up in Grand Prix mode so far.)
The novelty of the 3D graphics and the sheer driving joy inherent to all Ridge Racer games have carried it this far, but with nothing new to see and no challenge in sight, both are wearing thin and I'm not sure how much longer I can bear to continue. Astonishingly there's no online racing, only local wifi (not that I know anyone else with a 3DS anyway, even though all my friends are videogame journalists), and there's no Career mode to give my progress so far any sense of meaning.
You do get a completion percentage, which tells me I'm 25% of the way through, but that just fills me with dread at the thought of repeating everything I've done until now another three times. There are (as yet, anyway) no special challenges, no Devil Car-style one-on-ones, nothing to look forward to except the same races over and over, getting imperceptibly harder and faster until perhaps, one day, many battery charges in the future, I might fail to qualify first time.
The game's industry's brainless obsession with locked content has been out of control for too many years now. I've been ranting about it for over a decade now, but Dara O'Briain puts it much more succinctly and amusingly here. (Albeit from a slightly different perspective.)
If Namco want to make a game that ham-fisted cretins can enjoy, that's all very well. But FOR THE LOVE OF FUCKING GOD, let the rest of us jump straight in at Category 3 or Category 2 if we want to. If it's too hard, we can always go back to Mewling Infant level. As it stands, if there's an exciting game buried somewhere in Ridge Racer 3D (and there almost certainly is), I no longer have the stamina or the willpower to plough through the hours of tedious, repetitive, joy-sapping work required to find it. Life's too short.
A digression, but I think you'd really like Pilotwings Resort. Plenty of content there for those who like a good score attack.
I used to swap games with kids in the early 90's so I was well aware that most kids never got past the first couple of levels. They either gave up when there was the first hint of challenge or just lost interest.
Once the likes of Valve and Bungie built player tracking into their game engines they also came to realise this fact. 99% of the audience never completed the 2nd level. So every 1st person shooter became a linear corridor with no challenge. That way they managed to boost the 'engagement' level from 2% to 25%.
For the most part nowadays you have to play multiplayer games to have a hope of hitting a wall and feeling like you're being tested because at least online everybody can't be a winner. Unless you're talking about MMORPGs and most of those might as well be single players anyway because there's no real competition involved.
This is why I can't play forza/GT games any more. You have to spend hours and hours winning races by miles before you get to play the fun stuff.
Project Gotham 4 did it best, for me. Even the starting cars were quick, and you could set the difficulty for each individual race, making the whole game exciting (or as exciting as you wanted it).
“Once the likes of Valve and Bungie built player tracking into their game engines they also came to realise this fact. 99% of the audience never completed the 2nd level. So every 1st person shooter became a linear corridor with no challenge. That way they managed to boost the ‘engagement’ level from 2% to 25%.”
Sure, but Ridge Racer has no story. It doesn’t matter if people skip the first third of the game, because the next two thirds are exactly the same. As I said in the piece, I have no objection if Namco want to make the Basic GPs super-easy for the useless. Just don’t make me wade through them as well.
Any game which, by design, forces you to play through hours and hours of insultingly easy pedestrian levelling-up drivel before you get to enjoy anything resembling a challenge is in dire need of throwing down a well, along with the people who programmed it. The concept of selectable difficulty levels has been around for an awfully long time, so why not take the trouble to give players who aren't wretched snivelling crybabies the opportunity to have fun with the game they've paid money for, right from the off? I can't imagine it takes that much effort to ramp up the enemy intelligence or monster placement or firepower effectiveness (or whatever) for the benefit of players who don't want to see the end sequence on their first go. But then, I don't suppose extending the development time of games for the trifling purpose of making them more fun, even if it would take just a few hours of programming time, is permitted by the executive collective. After all, "challenge" isn't what The Kids want, is it? They've proved it with graphs.
On a cheerier note, thanks for the link to that Dara O'Briain clip, Stu! I hadn't previously seen that bit, and I was crying with laughter by the end.
At least they didn't make the additional content paid for DLC. Man I hate paid for DLC.
"Not only did it break ground in bringing high-speed 3D with realistic graphics to a console platform, it was also the pivot point around which home conversions of cutting-edge videogames started to become better than their coin-op counterparts."
No. In visual terms, a PlayStation fails to enter even the same orbit as Namco's System 22 hardware.
I didn't say "in visual terms".
So you mean it took until the PlayStation era for gameplay in the home to reach coin-op standards? What a strange claim.
It's because you went Scottish and bought a pre-owned copy to save two quid. I played it from new and took it back to the shop when I started losing, which was long before I'd played 60-something races. Maybe you got my second-hand copy, with 'mewling infant level' already activated.
"So you mean it took until the PlayStation era for gameplay in the home to reach coin-op standards?"
No, I mean the thing I said. Ridge Racer on the PS1 looked – on a home TV of the time – as near to the arcade as made next to no practical difference, but it had enhanced and expanded gameplay. It was, in effect, better than "arcade perfect".
Kind words for Ridge Racer on Playstation, but I'm going to be the cranky Gen Xer and say Daytona USA on Saturn was a much better game. Yes, the graphics were ugly and sloppy as hell in 1995, but so what? The gameplay was far more nuanced and sophisticated, the track design was spectacular (Daytona's hard track is probably my favorite ever), and causing spectacular 20-car pileups was something of a rush.
If I were to name a paradigm-shifting racing game from 1995, I'd probably go with Wipeout. Now that was a spectacular game. Swap out Ridge Racer for Wipeout and I'm in.
…. Great read there, Stu. Thanks very much mate.
Of course, I clocked that 'KLONDA' sign and my heart leaped for joy; it could only mean RR!
For me, RR has always been about 'going through the motions', at least in early stages – earning the prize money in order to buy stuff customising the 'machines' and so on. The Devil races aren't going to happen at 25% completion mate; in RR7, Monstrous/Angelus/Crinale are pretty much the last hurrah, bar the Opus races and UFRA Special Events.
(By the way, I *really* need to know, for some reason. Have you done UFRA Special Event 15 (I think) in RR7, the Age Ultranova extra-hard time attack, chap? Please don't tell me you thought this was a cakewalk, as I am liable to blub).
Daytona US GAY, more like. Wipeout? WipeGAY, more like.
I haven't played RR7 in probably literally years, can't remember what I've done in it. I played 6 a fair bit more. Also, KLONOA.
Ah yes, it is indeed "KLONOA".
…. I'll get my coat!
The Evolver looks very much like the Starnose that is in RR7. Some players swore by this car; it has a 'silent drift' apparently that charges the NOS like crazy despite barely drifting at all (assuming Galaxian +U plug-in, naturally), albeit I never managed to do this.
)
You'd probably find that spending some of your CR on it, for custom aero/body parts, tyres and engine upgrades/tuning etc. would tame the beast and improve the handling somewhat, although the dynamic drift would almost certainly still remain a handful.
Personally, I never got on with *any* dynamic drift car, even the Jujak, which probably marks me out as a bit of a muppet (although my FP and overall RR world ranking would suggest otherwise, meh). Heavily customised/upgraded standard drift Assoluto Bisonte and most especially the mild drift Himmel EO (a "Porsche", naturally) all the way for me.
Biggest disappointment of RR is how crap the hard-won "Special Machines" are, added to the fact that these cannot be upgraded at all. The Crinale ("Devil car") is particularly bad in this respect; when you're up against it, the AI can make it perform almost flawlessly, but when you get to drive it, it's an ill-handling shed of a thing with hopeless triple nitrous top end, despite looking as cool as. (I was seriously considering having "13 Racing" painted on the side of my £60k black Porker, that's how sad I am
Namco – please make Special Machines better for the player in RR8. Also, please give the Monstrous proper "powers" as well,and make it better anyway, to compensate for the barn door handling. I love that thing and used to race online with it much of the time, in taxi livery.
Rage Racer was extremely tedious for a while. You needed to repeat the same races over and over and over. Personally I have never seen what all the fuss was about with RR games. RR on PSX was pretty terrible. Hit the brakes and listen to your car do its best impression of a ghost going "woooooo"
The only thing either Ridge or Rage had going for them was the music and pretty graphics.
Ahh the good old days of Ridge Racer at the arcade… Brings a smile to my face (and then a frown because it was sooo long ago). I, for one, don't mind that the game is easy. It's not as if I am expecting brain-surgery-level challenge (I have Battlefield for that). But it is very disapointing that there's no online gaming. This feature should have been the game's best selling point… Upgrade Namco! The sooner the better!
A good read, this, and it sums up my experience with the game pretty well (I too, was a huge fan of Ridge Racer 64).
Having played the game over a launch weekend for the console, it was probably my enthusiasm for the new console/3D effect that spurred me on through the easy parts (the 3D effect is still hugely impressive, especially after seeing the disappointingly flat 3D of Resident Evil Revelations), but I'd definitely stick with it.
Once you're onto the latter Advanced Grand Prix races, the difficulty does ramp up, with the usual cheaty AI racing into view as the game demands 100% of your concentration, and Expert Grand Prix is insanely tough.
From what I remember that sees a mixup of the rules, where races are either duels, standard 4 player matches or elimination rounds, and without spoiling anything, there's the (somewhat predictable) bunch of exciting unlockable vehicles in Expert Grand Prix based off classic Namco franchises which move along at a pace.
The challenge is there, but as you mentioned it really is a grind to get to it – if Mario Kart demanded I played 50cc mode to unlock 100 and 150cc, I think I'd give up on single player entirely.
For the record, the game's telling me I've spent 11:30:31 on the Grand Prix (time spent in races and races alone I presume) to unlock absolutely everything, so hopefully that'll help a bit in terms of making the grind feel less, er, grindy.