when i think of ridge racer usually what comes to mind is smoothness (in both its mechanical and aesthetic prowess) and profound representation of real world context that races concurrently with the game’s own individual racers. even the first title as a rudimentary beginning still has the flair of that early-console-post-arcade mindset. jungly breakbeats of the era kick hard, perhaps being the only motivating factor to indulge at all.
rage racer sees this and for some reason decides to evolve the formula in ways that seem like they’d be no-brainers to AVOID implementing. was there any need for unnecessarily narrow corridors and roads that twist, turn, and bump up and down? racing is of course a test of reaction and muscle memory but this one leans way too much into the muscle memory factor. with the constant up-and-down-and-all-around attitude of the course design it’s basically down to memorization to survive these anti-racer extravaganzas. for some reason drifting also uncontrollably brings you to slower speeds and then manually tries to put you back into a fixed position while relieving you of all control. so much for perfect cornering.
look, i get what they were going for. cities lined up against waterfalls with roads along the countryside bridges etc etc; of course it works on paper but it’s failing to immerse me here especially when the track design conflicts with the logic behind it all. i understand these are “rage” racers who don’t participate in normal races, but it’s still possible to walk the ludonarrative fine line while making the gameplay fun. it’s a racing game. maybe it’s called rage racer because they knew how much people would rage at how unfun it can be sometimes. the soundtrack is nice but weirdly unfitting? i don’t know. i don’t think the actual game embraces late 90s immaturity as much as the soundtrack does.
we do get to see how the series evolved i suppose. i can definitely see where they built off of this for R4 and subsequent titles. this is just a boring and sometimes frustrating game to play. scuffed racer. jank racer. shit racer. Might Need A Remake. this is what this game is like

Much less pretty than its predecessors, but is actually playable and the music is great too.

I'd say the handling is worse than in Rave Racer but better than the first two Ridge Racers. It's responsive enough to be playable, but constantly feels unbalanced. Like the amount of effort to take the more difficult turns is not proportional to the amount it takes for the easier turns. As a result you end up always either understeering or oversteering, and occasionally you send the car drifting even without using the handbrake. Like, it's not fun to control the car here, but it's doable.

So I finished the first tournament, which consists of three very similar-looking tracks, and then the second tournament is doing the same tracks but with different opponents. I have a feeling there are only three tracks in the game. And while the environments are pretty detailed, they're so bland, like the game was drained of color compared to the previous entries. One thing I liked about the tracks though is how the time of day changes dynamically throughout the race.

But after beating the first four tracks, I felt like the game was starting to repeat itself. There is an upgrade system and other cars to buy, but you earn ridiculously little amounts of money per race, which would turn this game into a grindfest. Although maybe that's because I finished 3rd on every race. Speaking of which, the game's difficulty is so weird. You start the race behind everyone and then gradually outrun them one by one. And it feels like the opponents are not living entities, but rather just visual representations of how much you fuck up. It seems like, if you manage not to hit anything, you will finish 1st. Like the actual speed and your decisions on the track don't matter, as long as you just don't hit anything. Oh, and the collision model is still horrendous. You still bounce off of things like a pinball, even you as much as graze them.

Rage racer is the third game in the ridge racer series, and once again we have an aboslute vibe of a game. The game has a more muted and grey color palette, which kinda makes it the first one to really set its cloudy-day mood that later games like the PSP era of ridge racer and beyond will get into, which is pretty cool to see on a PS1. The racing itself can be a little weird and the difficulty is a bit unbalanced, but ridge racers always more about the vibes than anything else, and the vibes here are definitely of the good variety. This game has Silver Stream in it, impossible to be bad.

I'm a little shocked this one is rated lower than the original on here - ok it's by 0.1, but still - this seems like a straight upgrade to me. The cars control better, the course is a little more interesting, it has really great music, and there's a lil currency and customisation system which I appreciate. Having some progression helps make it feel less like an arcade game you'd play with some buddies every once in a while and more like a console game I want to play more often. The game's aesthetic is drabber and duller than the last two and next one, which lends to it not ageing quite as well, but it still achieves that late 90s - early 2000s feel of "this thing is trying to be cool, swings hard and misses, but is still kinda interesting and fun in its attempt?" I like it.

Problem is, I believe there's still only one course you go multiple routes through. I actually like this by itself, but I think the game needs more than one. Also, I still don't fully understand how to drift in this dang game. But maybe that's ok; I suppose games need some mystery. The original Assassin's Creed had the bedroom of cryptic blood at the end. Undertale has W.D. Gaster. Rage Racer has drifting. There are some things we aren't meant to know.

So, I've played the original and this [Editor's note: I didn't play Ridge Racer Revolution because as of 5 seconds ago I don't believe in revolution. Ridge Racer should affect change within the racing genre by just being slightly mad about things.] and I'm excited to play Type 4 since everyone seems to love it. Yep!

Começa bem legal até, mas quase imediatamente fica pior do que os outros dois Ridge Racer de PS1 que vieram antes por ser 7 vezes mais longo do que deveria.
O jogo te dá a experiência de dirigir um Celta seminovo morrendo toda vez que você tenta subir uma ladeira e saltitando como se tivesse passando por uma rua esburacada quando você passa pelas curvas do circuito oval. Realmente, tudo que eu queria num jogo de corrida.
Me dei o trabalho de cemporcentar o jogo pra poder falar mal e nunca mais ter que passar por isso, vou até fazer um backup do memory card.

Rage Racer fue el primer juego de la saga de carreras de Namco al que he jugado. Su apartado visual se distancia de los juegos anteriores más coloridos, aproximándose más a una estética algo más realista, y por ello presenta tonalidades de color más apagadas, con una gran presencia de elementos grises y texturas más detalladas.

El juego cuenta con 4 circuitos que se irán repitiendo constantemente al ir avanzando de ligas, y, cuando ganamos en cada uno de ellos, obtendremos dinero con el que podemos comprar nuevos coches o mejorar los que ya tengamos disponibles. A medida que vamos avanzando entre las ligas deberemos ir actualizando los coches para poder estar a la altura de los demás competidores si queremos quedar entre las 3 primeras posiciones. Sin embargo, esta toma de decisiones sobre qué vehículo comprar o mejorar se convierte en una prueba de ensayo y error en la que tendremos que guardar la partida antes, porque, de no hacerlo, si compramos coches poco eficientes habremos malgastado inútilmente el dinero y tendremos que volver a jugar las mismas fases que hemos superado para recuperarlo y probar con otros.

Hablando un poco más acerca de los vehículos, en Rage Racer existen cuatro tipos de estos y elegir uno de ellos marcará enormemente la diferencia durante las carreras. El Gnade es con el que empezamos, es el único con la cualidad de ser equilibrado, y su manera más óptima de tomar las curvas es reduciendo la velocidad con antelación para girar mejor en ellas, pues, si decidimos derrapar, el coche dará unos frenazos que nos harán perder mucha velocidad. Los Lizard son de enorme aceleración, de manera que no pierden apenas velocidad a la hora de subir las cuestas, pero no giran demasiado bien y ello nos obliga a tomar las curvas con derrapes de aceleración (soltando el acelerador un momento, pulsar la dirección que queramos y volver a acelerar). Los Age son más lentos pero a la vez más fáciles de maniobrar y toman mejor las curvas, sobre todo si realizamos derrapes de freno (girar primero, después pulsar el botón para frenar y volver a pulsar el botón de acelerar). Y, por último, están los Assoluto, que son coches deportivos que alcanzan grandes velocidades.

Cabe decir que cada uno de los recorridos del juego está pensado para favorecer el uso de un tipo de vehículo específico, y esto es algo que no se explica dentro del juego, sino en el manual. El Gnade va bien en Mythical Coast al ser un circuito básico (aunque es preferible deshacerse de él en cuanto se pueda uno permitir adquirir otro coche), los Lizard tienen un mejor desempeño en Over Pass City por sus empinadas cuestas y curvas para derrapar, los Age se defienden mejor en Lakeside Gate por sus sucesiones de curvas, y, por último, los Assoluto son imprescindibles en The Extreme Oval para mantener la velocidad máxima durante largas rectas en las que tendremos que esquivar constantemente a otros vehículos, incluso a los que sacaremos una vuelta de ventaja. Sin embargo, aunque cada vehículo se adapte mejor a uno u otro circuito, es posible ganar las carreras si llevamos otro de ellos, pero no sin excepciones, pues sí o sí debemos llevar un Assoluto en The Extreme Oval o no alcanzaremos a nadie, así como también, si decidimos utilizar esta clase de vehículos en otra de las pistas, nos daremos cuenta de que, por mucha velocidad que puedan alcanzar, son terriblemente torpes en las curvas y en las cuestas, ya que están pensados para mantener la velocidad máxima constantemente en tramos rectos y curvas muy amplias.

También tendremos la posibilidad de poder elegir entre jugar con transmisión automática o manual, y esto supone una diferencia crucial en la jugabilidad. Resulta que el juego no quiere que te acomodes usando la automática, y por ello, utilizar la manual tiene ventajas, especialmente, en la fluidez de la conducción. Uno de los mayores ejemplos está en los derrapes, que, a la hora de terminar de ejecutarlos usando la automática, lo más probable es que notes una pérdida brusca de velocidad. Usando la transmisión manual tienes que tener muy en cuenta el velocímetro para saber cuando tienes que cambiar de marchas y sí, durante los derrapes tienes que bajar a menudo una marcha mientras tomas las curvas para poder salir de ellas con soltura, y vaya que sí se nota la diferencia. El hecho de que el juego quiere que salgas de tu zona de comfort sale a la luz por completo cuando, a la hora de subir ligas y comprar coches nuevos, algunos tengan únicamente transmisión manual.

Sin embargo, el título no se libra de algunos problemas:

- Tiene una curva de dificultad algo irregular, pues hay casos en los que se notan grandes subidas de ella de una fase a otra dentro de una misma liga.

- Existe la característica de que contamos con 5 reintentos por liga, y agotarlos todos supone que perdamos todo el progreso acumulado. Desgraciadamente, esta pierde todo su sentido cuando tenemos la opción de guardar y cargar la partida en todo momento sin que ello afecte a nuestro progreso.

- Tener que volver a jugar fases ya superadas como forma de ganar dinero y así mejorar los coches con el fin de reducir la dificultad del juego, y es un proceso tedioso que alarga innecesariamente el juego.

- Colisiones no muy bien realizadas, pues podemos, en ocasiones, atravesar a otros vehículos e incluso cabe la posibilidad de quedarnos atascados cuando impactamos contra ellos, lo que nos hace perder la velocidad en seco mientras que estos pueden recuperarla muy rápidamente de forma injusta. También puede ocurrir que la perdamos de golpe si, al girar en algunas curvas, se da el caso de que chocamos en sus paredes con la parte trasera de nuestro vehículo.

- El juego no es claro por sí mismo explicando algunos de sus conceptos y espera que hayas leído su manual a la hora de jugar. Por este motivo, en una jugada anterior, cometí el error de mejorar el Gnade a nivel 4, perdiendo todo el dinero que había acumulado, y esperando ganar con él en The Great Oval, lo que me llevó a tener que hacer grindeo tedioso para poder comprar otro coche mejor.

Rage Racer me parece buen juego. Tener que jugar solo en 4 circuitos puede parecer repetitivo, pero, aunque sean escasos, es realmente disfrutable que tengamos que dominarlos a medida que avanzamos de ligas y consigamos vehículos más potentes. ¿Y qué decir de su banda sonora? Me parece de las más redondas de toda la saga. Es tan buena que hasta los nombres de sus canciones aparecen en la secuencia de introducción del título y no hay ninguna que no quiera escuchar a la hora de jugar.

As the blurb says. It does introduce a new system of career progression. You finally earn money to either buy or upgrade cars. Sounds silly now but it was really unique for it's time and later would be implemented in nearly every racing gamer later. I feel like this game tries to go for a almost reboot? Like the style tries some grit for the first time, still very arcade like but the colours are far more darker. There's a cool mood to this one and the tracks detail is considerably higher in fidelity and complexity albeit still being just the one. There's more variations than the others as well. I do like it. It doesn't have the immediate accessibility like the last 2 but it finally has that console tailored feel. The grind is a little there if ya suck and the game is a step up in challenge too

for a while there as i was progressing through this series i was beginning to think that ridge racer and i were incompatible in much the same way that garou: mark of the wolves and i are incompatible. this might take a while to explain, so let me be self-indulgent. garou is a beloved fighting game set in the fatal fury universe, analagous to what third strike's position within the street fighter canon is in that it is furthest ahead in the chronological timeline while simultaneously being made up of 90% new characters. it's a gorgeous game; like an abundance of their fighting games, SNK's spritework there was emotive, refined, and confident, boldly speaking to their artistry as fighting game aesthetes. at their peak, SNK was able to configure their cast of characters with both larger than life charm and an inexplicable verisimilitude despite the usually insane subject matter grounding the proceedings, and i think that can be sensed through both the unusual amount of care put into designing and characterizing the cast but also their comparably muted fashion. the best example of this is someone like iori yagami, a particular combination of a grouchy yet soulful disposition and completely unique attire that is considered almost untouchable by SNK (you might even remember sakurai calling this design genius and he was right). but in almost every iteration of king of fighters where he's wearing some new outfit you can feel SNK attempt to translate not only the core design tenets of what makes iori 'iori', but also to bring that look in-line with what iori might reasonably wear for the day. this is impossible to sum up without devoting a great deal more time towards this than is necessary, but it's my view that SNK probably cares for their stable of characters more than any other fighting game developer you can imagine.

and i think that influenced garou's reception in subtle ways, because the game is impossibly cool while carrying a lot of what makes SNK such an excellent team. redesigning fatal fury's own running wild wolf, terry, feels like sacrilege, but they somehow made him every bit as cool while staying true to terry; likewise, garou's centerpiece character, rock howard, is so impossibly well conceived that he's almost a bit like baiken from guilty gear fame in terms of being a character more beloved and renowned than the game he originated from. and that's part of the problem - far be it from me to suggest a fighting game cannot succeed on the basis of its aesthetics (i am, after all, a huge fan of the last blade 2), but actually playing garou feels kind of...not great. we're getting into 'gamefeel' territory now but genuinely i think that for all that's great about garou, it's a really stiff fighting game with questionable design decisions, subpar feeling normals, combo routing and inputting that feels like im a bit underwater, and on the fighting game spectrum resembles street fighter more than a SNK flagship title to its own detriment. garou earned its place in the canon through sheer force of will, which is worthy of respect if nothing else, but more and more over the years i've learned that despite still appreciating some of its qualities i would also rather play anything else. and that's as controversial as it gets for fighting games for me; it's a genre that i love but am usually quite lenient towards because the gulf between the perception of the masters and the people eternally stuck at midlevel (me) is comically vast.

ridge racer came across as something similar initially. could not for the life of me figure this series out - there was a perceived friction between what i felt was an arcade racer taken to its most extreme definition (cars that are like feathers in currents of wind, a proclivity for breakneck speed, a dismissal of 'reality' and an invocation of emotion and adrenaline, cars that bounce off walls as though they're padded) mixed with mastery-oriented mechanics that were strict in implementation, requiring instinct and precognition in tandem. essentially what i felt was that i would be getting one game on the straightaways, and an entirely different game the moment it was time to tackle a corner while preserving full momentum. drifting was really the make-or-break mechanic for me and i spent a long time, uninitiated, trying to crack open that puzzlebox to see the valued core buried within, because everything else about ridge racer rocked. there was only one track, essentially, but it was an intelligently designed track with an almost sega-like approach to bright blue visuals accompanied by a perfectly executed rave/techno soundtrack. it worked when you were cruising, but it was so goddamn grating when your car stalled out of a drift with seemingly no control.

anyways, i played revolution, rave racer, and then rage racer all after that, and rage racer was the moment that everything snapped into focus. this awakening was so sudden and violent, however, that i immediately dropped rage racer and returned to the older entries to discover that they were actually really good, and the unfortunate reality for rage racer is that when i came back i felt kind of disappointed with it.

so basically with these four titles (with rave racer being a bit of an exception), there were a few keys to 'proper' play. firstly, part of what ended up working for me was abandoning the third-person camera entirely. there's a tendency for me to use that camera orientation because i think it's easier to gauge distance with my surroundings and because it lets you more intimately connect with your vehicle of choice. not so in ridge racer! not only are you missing out on some truly roller-coaster paced competitive drama, but i also found it abundantly more difficult to drift effectively without the first-person camera orienting my approach on corners and letting me exercise my control over cars and making sure the drift didn't suddenly send me careening into a wall. prior to this, these cars kind of felt like wild stallions - maybe it's reasonable to assume that anyone can casually 'ride' a horse if they were just placed on it, but actually exercising legitimate control over them takes time and practice to overcome temperament.

the second, and by far the most important key to success, was learning that there are two kinds of drifts in ridge racer. the first is the most obvious for anyone familiar with other games - accelerate into a corner, begin the turn, hit the brakes, and complete the turn while accelerating to complete the movement. but that's only one type of drift here, recommended for low speeds because executing such a maneuver at high speeds would, more often than not, take a cudgel to your momentum and control. rather, the preferred movement is slightly less intuitive, but far more simple: accelerate into a corner, take your foot off the gas, begin turning into the corner, and then accelerate again. during the drift you would have to meticulously angle your car with the hopes of aligning its body with the road and allowing for safe acceleration, but this was pretty easy when executed properly.

the final key was just exceedingly obvious: not every corner needs to be drifted! understanding of the topography became an obvious necessity here, because sometimes it's far more efficient to just grip the asphalt with your brakes and turn the corner without executing a full-on drift. it's the easiest technique by far, and the beauty of ridge racer becomes discovering which corners correspond best to which techniques. all this meant that i was able to finally begin appreciating these games and the unique niche they occupy in the genre - maybe this all sounds obvious to the veterans but im not going to let my pride prevent me from stating that i struggled for a while here and all of the advice i consulted online was really poorly articulated.

rage racer is technically the second title in the series that feels like it was genuinely considered for the home console market, but in practice it feels more like the first. revolution before it was not too dissimilar from the original ridge racer, existing as an updated port of ridge racer 2 which was, itself, an update to the original. rage racer is comparably more meaty, but this ends up being injurious to its cause. the most interesting thing they've done here is turning grip and drift into a fully customizable mechanical feature - on top of choosing between modes of transmission, you can select what your car will specialize in in a manner that feels more explicit than it did in prior entries. it allows for different takes on the same tracks, which is nice! it's clearly a feature added for replayability, similarly to the fact that you earn money from GPs now to funnel into tune-ups and new cars. you can even customize your car's logo using a mini MS-paint feature!

but despite retaining many of the usual great quintessentially ridge racer qualities (albeit muddier this time), what most of this engineered replayability is in service of is redoing by far the most boring tracks in the series yet. five to seven minutes per session and nary a hint of the usual excitement to make it worth the time invested. previously i complimented ridge racer's roller-coaster pacing, but rage racer feels quite literally like a roller-coaster in that its track design now includes multiple hills that feel downright glacial to surmount. this obviously incentivizes opting for manual transmission and shifting gears to accomodate for loss of speed but it's incredibly dry and barebones in practice. these tracks are just so much less interesting than their predecessors that it killed the appeal of the game for me.

it's got a killer soundtrack, even still, and i hate to slam a game that has silver case sfx in its menus and inarguably has one of the coolest intros of all time but, especially having properly learned to play the series, it's so much less compelling than the games before it. the most interesting thing is that this sows the aesthetic seeds of what will eventually manifest as ridge racer type 4, but it's otherwise inessential.