Well, the rest of the Extra GP’s in Ridge Racer V fell down like dominos. There was a weird “Elimination” GP that essentially brought back arcade-style time limits to the checkpoints. That caught me off-guard 'cause I wasn’t paying attention to the menu text! Then there was a GP with with reversed courses (and no altered course indicators, so you have to memorize the turns that aren’t telegraphed), and…in an utterly bizarre move for a Ridge Racer game…the last GP you unlock is just…
A single oval course!
That you race 10 laps on!
You have to draft behind the other racers to win, but it’s too easy and it seems like an afterthought, even though they clearly built a new course for it and that took time. I beat it on the first attempt. You earn an insanely fast engine/car that you can then use the other courses, but it’s a total joke when you do that–it won’t drift normally and makes racing miserable.
After you beat the oval, you get the Ridge City FM DJ signing off (literally) and the credits roll. The idea of the DJ being in the game as an announcer/live broadcaster was super underdeveloped, to the point of sticking out. I’m actually fine with that–no one really wants Striker from Burnout 3 again–but the earnest little clip of audio talking about “racers competing in Ridge City” always plays at the same point in lap 3 of most courses, and it’s really the only bit of flavor except for the regular lap announcements and such that have been in the series forever. In the sound test, you can tab between tracks, and the track doesn’t play until the DJ makes a remark and queues it up, which is also cute.
The end credits music is goddamn incredible!
Actually, overall, it’s a good soundtrack. More vocal tracks than any other Ridge Racer game? Some period stuff that didn’t age very well, a few things that fade into the background, but a lot of bangers nevertheless. There’s a version of Grip that’s really good, and I am a huge sucker for Grip!
Unrelated to RRV, here is Grip remade on two Nintendo DS-i’s running the Korg MS-10 app that I listen to all the goddamn time:
Just some other stray thoughts about RRV:
The AI racers are super aggressive in a way I ended up finding pretty fun! Sometimes I would get bullied so hard at the start that I had to laugh.
The game runs in 480i mode at 60 fps, and continues with the art direction from R4, so it’s got chunky interlaced pixels, but still looks great. The three times of day are “slightly overcast” (not really, but it feels like that with the art direction), sunset, and nighttime. I like the look, but the only time I rubbed against it was when racing on the original Ridge Racer courses, because you expect to see a Sega blue sky and neon colors everywhere, not this grownup-ass soothing adult aesthetic.
There are, unsurprisingly, a lot of very low-res textures with bilinear filtering…this is like, the first PS2 game after all. But what I found surprising was seeing that you can somehow straight up see the regular, almost unfiltered-looking pixels on some parts of the cars when viewed close up, for whatever reason. I feel like if you turned all the bilinear filtering off, this would look pretty close to R4, which is not so much a slight on this being a PS2 launch title as it is saying that R4 reached the stratosphere as a late stage PSX game and got there somehow. UI design is not nearly as good as R4’s, but nothing else would ever compete with that again, I reckon.
My overall bottom line impression is that I liked RRV–it feels to me to be very close in feel to (my memory of) the first Ridge Racer, especially in it’s rough edges and the challenge it presents. It feels like a slightly incomplete entry in the series in the way that the PSX/System 22 games don’t, because it’s a launch title and was probably developed in 8 months on a brand new SDK. Given that context, it’s pretty great.
I did notice a bit of the powerslide “magnet” creeping in at times (as long as you are in a slide, you will follow the line of the turn) but it is nowhere near as severe as it will be in the games coming up! It feels like a good balance where it is still a useful tool, but cannot be deployed at any moment to save your butt, because it is still easy to deploy it incorrectly and you will either lose speed or hit a barrier. You still need to learn the courses and figure out where to brake to keep your pace up, and slight taps on the barrier add up if you’re not vigilant.
Am I going to pick up Ridge Racer 3D next? I probably should.
