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.
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.