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04. kohta / "euphoria"
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last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
04. kohta / "euphoria"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.
the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.
Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.
it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.
to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.
the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.
this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.
and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.
it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.
racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.
god, do i miss The Bouncer.
i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.
i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.
i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.
i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.
POST-MILLENNIUM RACING. type 4 is for your worldly mensch, the racing connoisseurs and aficionados. the final legs of real racing roots '99 ushered in the new millennium on new year's eve, signalling celebration of what came before and eager anticipation of what was to come. the future arrived in V, a title with sensibilities that cut deeper than expression.
competitive sports (and more particularly mixed martial arts/combat sports) over the past few decades have long reckoned with and compulsively obsessed over the perfect distillation of instinct and science; they have subsequently raced toward achieving idealized equilibriums of the two to sharpen emerging talent, and in no ridge racer is this competitive element more clearly expressed than in V. V is for the drifting junkies, the highway savants, the people who communicate in shifting gears. ridge racer's humble offerings have long skewed towards quality over quantity, and V remains no exception with only seven tracks, but they're by far the best tracks in the entire franchise - the perfect intersection between high-octane enjoyment and intense opportunity for replayability and mastery. even at normal difficulty this is a significant degree more demanding than any ridge racer prior to it. not only is the general tempo of a racing bout faster, but success (and lack thereof) can be determined in the first lap depending on whether or not you have demonstrated the prerequisite driving IQ. without a consummate level of control and without the ability to read flow, you're going to be almost immediately outclassed by the enemy AI which has now been retooled to be far more aggressive than in prior entries. at a minimum, you'll need to configure every single corner and stretch of the track into an equation to be solved and make an effort to intimately understand their nuances, which is compounded by the handling of the default six cars feeling more distinct than ever before. no two vehicles are ever going to approach a situation the exact same way anymore, with routes on a map feeling tailored to each of their advantages and disadvantages. one vehicle might be able to get away with gripping asphalt til their rubber is chafed and raw; another might find that shifting gears down temporarily is the only option for success. it was the first time in the franchise i felt like all the minutiae of a match really mattered and if i wasnt countersteering appropriately, looking for opportunities to shunt out trailing cars behind me, and committing terrain to memory i'd be done for. the relentless difficulty coalesced into probably the most intense racing game i have ever played, but it felt alien at first; more than ever, drifting, seemingly built on new physics, appears to factor in gear, weight, speed, acceleration undertaken during the drift, countersteering input, proximity to other vehicles, and terrain, so it almost evokes ace combat's core appeal of a constant set of calculations to be undertaken. aesthetically it's really impressive for one of the first games launched on the PS2: muted winter-blue skies, sunsets on the hills of ridge city, darkened city apartment blocks as if to suggest no life exists outside of the competition on the streets. strong art direction has really allowed it to stand the test of time in a similar capacity to type 4. drifting into the warm and heightened glow of the sun at dusk is everything in this game. once again the soundtrack just does not miss a beat, this time incorporating more diversity in the tracks that really perfectly encapsulate the game's identity as an early aughts project. fogbound serving as the game's lo-fi grungy breakbeat anthem is just perfect for immersing you into the hyper-vigilance required for a race and euphoria is pretty much one of the all-time great VGM tracks. really didn't expect this but i think i have to give V the edge over type 4, with its gorgeous menus and evocative soundtrack it genuinely goes blow for blow with type 4's accomplished aesthetic while simultaneously offering the in-depth and transformative qualities i tend to look for in racing games. i think there's something to be said for type 4's aesthetic idealization for driving versus V's gesturings at reality that games of its generation would later become obsessed with, expressed through an air of practicality that emphasizes function over form, a less flashy yet sleek UI combined with more in-depth mechanics. to put it a different way: never did the characteristic racing game lean in type 4, did it unconsciously in almost every race in V. gonna be playing this one for a looong time. the only real problem i have here is that going for a grip class vehicle with automatic transmission is unquestionably the easiest way to play which is unfortunate for people like me who prefer the exact opposite
also ai fukami is a much hotter race queen than reiko nagase is, it's insane. earnestly upset she never came back because people thought she wasnt as iconic as reiko. once again tenure has sabotaged the prospects of a promising young lady and all you fools have deprived her of a JOB! sorry your 3D waifish mascot lady who only appears in pre-rendered CG to fawn over you and your big [engine] can't compare to the brazen edge of realtime animated ai fukami!!!! as if to say 'show me what you're made of, first!' well, i pledge this grand prix to you, fukami! drift-class danver toreador, manual transmission, i know what im about
competitive sports (and more particularly mixed martial arts/combat sports) over the past few decades have long reckoned with and compulsively obsessed over the perfect distillation of instinct and science; they have subsequently raced toward achieving idealized equilibriums of the two to sharpen emerging talent, and in no ridge racer is this competitive element more clearly expressed than in V. V is for the drifting junkies, the highway savants, the people who communicate in shifting gears. ridge racer's humble offerings have long skewed towards quality over quantity, and V remains no exception with only seven tracks, but they're by far the best tracks in the entire franchise - the perfect intersection between high-octane enjoyment and intense opportunity for replayability and mastery. even at normal difficulty this is a significant degree more demanding than any ridge racer prior to it. not only is the general tempo of a racing bout faster, but success (and lack thereof) can be determined in the first lap depending on whether or not you have demonstrated the prerequisite driving IQ. without a consummate level of control and without the ability to read flow, you're going to be almost immediately outclassed by the enemy AI which has now been retooled to be far more aggressive than in prior entries. at a minimum, you'll need to configure every single corner and stretch of the track into an equation to be solved and make an effort to intimately understand their nuances, which is compounded by the handling of the default six cars feeling more distinct than ever before. no two vehicles are ever going to approach a situation the exact same way anymore, with routes on a map feeling tailored to each of their advantages and disadvantages. one vehicle might be able to get away with gripping asphalt til their rubber is chafed and raw; another might find that shifting gears down temporarily is the only option for success. it was the first time in the franchise i felt like all the minutiae of a match really mattered and if i wasnt countersteering appropriately, looking for opportunities to shunt out trailing cars behind me, and committing terrain to memory i'd be done for. the relentless difficulty coalesced into probably the most intense racing game i have ever played, but it felt alien at first; more than ever, drifting, seemingly built on new physics, appears to factor in gear, weight, speed, acceleration undertaken during the drift, countersteering input, proximity to other vehicles, and terrain, so it almost evokes ace combat's core appeal of a constant set of calculations to be undertaken. aesthetically it's really impressive for one of the first games launched on the PS2: muted winter-blue skies, sunsets on the hills of ridge city, darkened city apartment blocks as if to suggest no life exists outside of the competition on the streets. strong art direction has really allowed it to stand the test of time in a similar capacity to type 4. drifting into the warm and heightened glow of the sun at dusk is everything in this game. once again the soundtrack just does not miss a beat, this time incorporating more diversity in the tracks that really perfectly encapsulate the game's identity as an early aughts project. fogbound serving as the game's lo-fi grungy breakbeat anthem is just perfect for immersing you into the hyper-vigilance required for a race and euphoria is pretty much one of the all-time great VGM tracks. really didn't expect this but i think i have to give V the edge over type 4, with its gorgeous menus and evocative soundtrack it genuinely goes blow for blow with type 4's accomplished aesthetic while simultaneously offering the in-depth and transformative qualities i tend to look for in racing games. i think there's something to be said for type 4's aesthetic idealization for driving versus V's gesturings at reality that games of its generation would later become obsessed with, expressed through an air of practicality that emphasizes function over form, a less flashy yet sleek UI combined with more in-depth mechanics. to put it a different way: never did the characteristic racing game lean in type 4, did it unconsciously in almost every race in V. gonna be playing this one for a looong time. the only real problem i have here is that going for a grip class vehicle with automatic transmission is unquestionably the easiest way to play which is unfortunate for people like me who prefer the exact opposite
also ai fukami is a much hotter race queen than reiko nagase is, it's insane. earnestly upset she never came back because people thought she wasnt as iconic as reiko. once again tenure has sabotaged the prospects of a promising young lady and all you fools have deprived her of a JOB! sorry your 3D waifish mascot lady who only appears in pre-rendered CG to fawn over you and your big [engine] can't compare to the brazen edge of realtime animated ai fukami!!!! as if to say 'show me what you're made of, first!' well, i pledge this grand prix to you, fukami! drift-class danver toreador, manual transmission, i know what im about
Coordination, planning and solutions on the go.
Taking a curve has never make me feel so accomplished.
It requires calmness while keeping a sharp eye on your opponents. I wouldn't say it's a game about preying on your opponents, but a game about being entranced while they are leading you, and then feeling the smoothness itself as you ride all by yourself.
Don't rush the experience; the first two hours are for losing and experimenting the different cars.
Taking a curve has never make me feel so accomplished.
It requires calmness while keeping a sharp eye on your opponents. I wouldn't say it's a game about preying on your opponents, but a game about being entranced while they are leading you, and then feeling the smoothness itself as you ride all by yourself.
Don't rush the experience; the first two hours are for losing and experimenting the different cars.
The definitive "turn of the new millenium" experience.