I've been using my PS3 a bit more often lately and saw that I bought Ridge Racer Type 4 from the PSN Store like ten years ago.
I had never played Ridge Racer before, but I heard good things about that one in particular from fans of the series.
I tried it for about half an hour when I bought it but could not figure out the driving model.
The physics were complete nonsense and I found it very difficult to play, even as someone who is a racing game fan.
I finally gave it another shot last night and forced myself to figure it out - turns out that game is great!
I finished the Grand Prix with 'Pac Racing Club' which is the 'normal' difficulty I think?
Now that I understand the feel a bit more (and how it completely changes at high speed vs slow) I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Might have to track down a copy of Ridge Racer V when I'm done with this. I love that era of gaming as I was a young kid at the time and everything seemed magical.
Playing PS1 games and then going to PS2 still makes me feel a bit giddy as I can relive the excitement a little bit.
Thank you for reviving the thread. They recently found out that the PS1 logo on boot up is actually a 3D model. I guess it is used to test if the 3D graphics are working.
The early Ridge Racer series on Playstation consoles is kinda weird. The first game is a straight arcade port, almost zero frills. It's notable for introducing Namco's (patented) technology that allows you to play classic games while modern games are loading (Ridge Racer let you play Galaxian while the game loaded, and destroying all of the ships quickly enough actually awarded you with a larger car selection). It's also notable for the fact that the entire game (minus the CD audio) comes to less than 2MB in size, and as such can sit comfortably within the PS1's RAM. This means that, once you get to the main menu, the game disc no longer needs to be accessed for anything other than music. You can swap the Ridge Racer disk out for any audio CD and play the game just fine, including saving and loading. This also means that the load times are almost non-existent, which is nice. The "drifting" in Ridge Racer is very rough.
Ridge Racer Revolution was basically "More Ridge Racer", it's very similar to the first game.
Rage Racer was this weird proto-storyline based game where you're engaging in racing series' and earning money that you can use to upgrade your cars. You had cars that were better at drifting, and cars that were better at traditional racing. One thing that was really cool was that you could design an emblem for your race team and have it slapped onto your cars.
R4 is the only game that really puts an emphasis on the storyline. Picking a racing team and having dialogue with your team chief after each race depending on how well you did is pretty novel for an arcade racing game. The drifting got a lot smoother (though still nowhere near as smooth as the PSP Ridge Racer's "boost" mechanic that the series used for every game afterward), but it's still fairly clunky. If you have trouble getting into the zone with the drift mechanics than you can always just use grip cars and treat it like a normal racing game. It is one of the best looking games on the PS1. If you like weird eurobeat/club/trance/acidjazz music than the soundtrack will be right up your alley. There is an absolute assload of cars, but you'll never be able to get 100% of them without a Pocketstation, which is the only downside.
Ridge Racer V is a bit of a backstep in terms of storyline, but it was the last game with the old pre-boost drift style, and by then they had completely refined it so the game is a real joy to play. It suffers really heavily from the Launch PS2 game graphical issue where developers hadn't figured out how to get the system to do software anti-aliasing yet, but it's still a very good looking game, and if you played earlier games in the series it was pretty amazing to see how some of the old cars and circuits looked on the PS2. It also runs at a consistent 60fps, which is really nice. Between the driving mechanics and the soundtrack, it's very easy to get into a zen like mode where you are 100% in the groove and start hitting every corner perfectly. Keep an ear out for the ESL racing announcer who excitedly yells about other cars getting "too close for comm-forrt" when you get bumped by another racer.
The PSP Ridge Racers are a lot of fun as well. There were two games released, the first called (appropriately enough) Ridge Racer, and the second was either called Ridge Racers 2 or Ridge Racer 2 depending on what territory you were in. It never had a North American release, but if you have a PSP you should track it down, because the sequel is literally just the first game but with the addition of a ton of new courses (every single course from the first 4 Ridge Racer games, and some of the courses from Ridge Racer 5 are all included in Ridge Racer 2 for the PSP). They introduced the "boost" mechanic that was used in every Ridge Racer game afterward (drifting builds up a nitro gauge, once full you can activate nitro for a temporary speed boost. Once a boost is finished, there is a brief period where you fill your nitro gauge faster, so learning where the best spots on each track are to boost will make it easier to get more boosts over the course of a race).
Ridge Racer on the Vita is an absolutely gorgeous shitshow that was Namco attempting to milk customers with the most predatory free to play style microtransaction scheme ever created, only the game wasn't free to play - the base game was $30, and only came with 3 tracks and 5 cars. The rest of the game was overpriced DLC. It's a very pretty glorified techdemo, so if you have a Vita it's definitely worth checking out, but don't pay for it.
I'm way into the soundtrack for sure. I'm a big jazz fusion fan and I can see why people hold it in such esteem.
I'd heard of Rage Racer in the past but didn't know it was part of this series - I had guessed from the name that it was some kind of car combat game.
I tried using some of the grip cars in R4 last night but don't really like them now that I'm used to the drift style. Feels like understeer city, but I was using the slowest car. Will have to try some faster ones to get a proper feel for it.
I've watched some gameplay of RR7 and it looks like you're basically forced to drift through most corners.
It's hard to get a feel for the changes in driving style without playing it, but I've read that 7 is pretty different compared to 4 or 5?
edit: Watched some more videos and I can now see that there are three different styles in 7!
I guess the first video I watched was a particularly touchy mode (plus the person playing wasn't very good). :P
Aaaaaand after playing a bunch of R4 I've fallen back to my old favourite: Midnight Club.
Been playing MC2 and 3 and remembering why I love them so much.
If Rockstar gave a shit about the series I'd love a new one. Maybe they will release a 'remaster' to gauge interest in a sequel some day?
I wouldn't even care if they didn't do much to it. Just upscale for modern TVs and lock all three games to 60 fps and I'll be ecstatic.
Playing MC2 still feels so good, but the framerate in 3 can get pretty rough. If it was at 60 that would be huge.
I know MC2 was available on Steam years ago but I think it's been delisted? Maybe I'll check GoG.
This is why I miss PS1, 2, and even 3 generation. Developers took more risks.
Although to be fair, I guess we are seeing a lot of that now with indie devs, which is great to see. AAA seems to be the same old stuff every year though.
I think we give indies bit too much credit for taking risks. So many procedurally generated roguelikes. So much "souls-like" combat and 8/16-bit pixel art. So many visual novels that aren't even really games at all. Sure, there are a lot of quirky/creative premises, but that's usually just on the surface, with traditional gameplay underneath.
Indies are romanticized as this last bastion of creativity, and while they are very different from AAA games, they're not that dissimilar from each other.
This is why I miss PS1, 2, and even 3 generation. Developers took more risks.
Although to be fair, I guess we are seeing a lot of that now with indie devs, which is great to see. AAA seems to be the same old stuff every year though.
This game uses the Gex 3 engine. It was a pretty beefy engine for the PS1.
I think we give indies bit too much credit for taking risks. So many procedurally generated roguelikes. So much "souls-like" combat and 8/16-bit pixel art. So many visual novels that aren't even really games at all. Sure, there are a lot of quirky/creative premises, but that's usually just on the surface, with traditional gameplay underneath.
Indies are romanticized as this last bastion of creativity, and while they are very different from AAA games, they're not that dissimilar from each other.
Maybe, but don't let the ones not taking risks drown out the ones that are. They often have nothing to lose and are labors of love more than anything and we often benefit from that. We can't often say that for big name publishers anymore, but that's probably more on us as gamers than anything for buying the same recycled crap year after year.
True, but the indie games that are both truly unique and actually good are super ridiculously rare. The majority of good indie games I've played were largely derivative. But to me, that's often a good thing, since they tend to rehash/refine the types of games the big publishers don't bother with anymore.
I was playing Sonic Mega Collection Plus on the PS2. It seems like it has a filter on the games. Either that or it is the component video. I was playing that collection because it has all the Knuckles games.
I was playing Sonic Mega Collection Plus on the PS2. It seems like it has a filter on the games. Either that or it is the component video. I was playing that collection because it has all the Knuckles games.
Sonic Mega Collection upscales to 480i. Though it seems like it can be easily hacked to 240p.
I was playing Sonic Mega Collection Plus on the PS2. It seems like it has a filter on the games. Either that or it is the component video. I was playing that collection because it has all the Knuckles games.
Sonic Mega Collection upscales to 480i. Though it seems like it can be easily hacked to 240p.
I was manually unlocking the games on the PS2. That is a pain. You have to open and close games 20 times. I also tried a save game that unlocked everything on the PS2 emulator.
I need to find a way to copy saves from the PC to the PS2.
Duckstation froze when I finished the first level of Tai Fu. Beetle HW in Retroarch made some beeps. This game does not work well in emulators. Swanstation worked.
Ps1 had an impressive library of unusual, neat games. I remember how cool and novelty it was for Resident Evil 2 to be a two disc game. Or how fun it was to discover some half baked odd sci-fi game about a character waking up from cryosleep. Finding a used copy of a 3rd person shooter starring a scanned CG constructed Bruce Willis in the game "Apocalypse" was an unusual discovery. CG cutscenes for many of the games on the system was clearly a selling feature for the platform. From the quality artistry of Square Enix or Capcom and everything in between.
Highlights of the platform for me were Driver and Silent Hill. Before I owned a ps1 I had to convince my mom to let me rent one just so I could play Alien Trilogy on an extremely old TV set without any brightness adjust. For a game color palette of blacks and greys I sure had a lot of fun staring at what amounted to basically a blank screen.
Yeah Monster Rancher games are hot commodities, unfortunately. I think I went through my parents' entire CD collection looking for neat monsters to hatch as a kid.
There's apparently a really good Monater Rancher for Gamecube that I always meant to track down, but it's even more rare and expensive than the others, these days.
I actually started playing 4 at a friend's and I really enjoyed it. Wonder if Maximum Tune and Initial D's arcade story modes decided to build on RR's foundation. MT's has dialogue in the middle of the races, and lots of neat interactive events(like rivals showing up halfway into the race). Heck, I imagine a lot of RR's team are probably on the MT team, since it's also Namco.
Posts
I got the Darkstalker's collection in the mail. Haven't fired up the emulator yet.
I had never played Ridge Racer before, but I heard good things about that one in particular from fans of the series.
I tried it for about half an hour when I bought it but could not figure out the driving model.
The physics were complete nonsense and I found it very difficult to play, even as someone who is a racing game fan.
I finally gave it another shot last night and forced myself to figure it out - turns out that game is great!
I finished the Grand Prix with 'Pac Racing Club' which is the 'normal' difficulty I think?
Now that I understand the feel a bit more (and how it completely changes at high speed vs slow) I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Might have to track down a copy of Ridge Racer V when I'm done with this. I love that era of gaming as I was a young kid at the time and everything seemed magical.
Playing PS1 games and then going to PS2 still makes me feel a bit giddy as I can relive the excitement a little bit.
The early Ridge Racer series on Playstation consoles is kinda weird. The first game is a straight arcade port, almost zero frills. It's notable for introducing Namco's (patented) technology that allows you to play classic games while modern games are loading (Ridge Racer let you play Galaxian while the game loaded, and destroying all of the ships quickly enough actually awarded you with a larger car selection). It's also notable for the fact that the entire game (minus the CD audio) comes to less than 2MB in size, and as such can sit comfortably within the PS1's RAM. This means that, once you get to the main menu, the game disc no longer needs to be accessed for anything other than music. You can swap the Ridge Racer disk out for any audio CD and play the game just fine, including saving and loading. This also means that the load times are almost non-existent, which is nice. The "drifting" in Ridge Racer is very rough.
Ridge Racer Revolution was basically "More Ridge Racer", it's very similar to the first game.
Rage Racer was this weird proto-storyline based game where you're engaging in racing series' and earning money that you can use to upgrade your cars. You had cars that were better at drifting, and cars that were better at traditional racing. One thing that was really cool was that you could design an emblem for your race team and have it slapped onto your cars.
R4 is the only game that really puts an emphasis on the storyline. Picking a racing team and having dialogue with your team chief after each race depending on how well you did is pretty novel for an arcade racing game. The drifting got a lot smoother (though still nowhere near as smooth as the PSP Ridge Racer's "boost" mechanic that the series used for every game afterward), but it's still fairly clunky. If you have trouble getting into the zone with the drift mechanics than you can always just use grip cars and treat it like a normal racing game. It is one of the best looking games on the PS1. If you like weird eurobeat/club/trance/acidjazz music than the soundtrack will be right up your alley. There is an absolute assload of cars, but you'll never be able to get 100% of them without a Pocketstation, which is the only downside.
Ridge Racer V is a bit of a backstep in terms of storyline, but it was the last game with the old pre-boost drift style, and by then they had completely refined it so the game is a real joy to play. It suffers really heavily from the Launch PS2 game graphical issue where developers hadn't figured out how to get the system to do software anti-aliasing yet, but it's still a very good looking game, and if you played earlier games in the series it was pretty amazing to see how some of the old cars and circuits looked on the PS2. It also runs at a consistent 60fps, which is really nice. Between the driving mechanics and the soundtrack, it's very easy to get into a zen like mode where you are 100% in the groove and start hitting every corner perfectly. Keep an ear out for the ESL racing announcer who excitedly yells about other cars getting "too close for comm-forrt" when you get bumped by another racer.
The PSP Ridge Racers are a lot of fun as well. There were two games released, the first called (appropriately enough) Ridge Racer, and the second was either called Ridge Racers 2 or Ridge Racer 2 depending on what territory you were in. It never had a North American release, but if you have a PSP you should track it down, because the sequel is literally just the first game but with the addition of a ton of new courses (every single course from the first 4 Ridge Racer games, and some of the courses from Ridge Racer 5 are all included in Ridge Racer 2 for the PSP). They introduced the "boost" mechanic that was used in every Ridge Racer game afterward (drifting builds up a nitro gauge, once full you can activate nitro for a temporary speed boost. Once a boost is finished, there is a brief period where you fill your nitro gauge faster, so learning where the best spots on each track are to boost will make it easier to get more boosts over the course of a race).
Ridge Racer on the Vita is an absolutely gorgeous shitshow that was Namco attempting to milk customers with the most predatory free to play style microtransaction scheme ever created, only the game wasn't free to play - the base game was $30, and only came with 3 tracks and 5 cars. The rest of the game was overpriced DLC. It's a very pretty glorified techdemo, so if you have a Vita it's definitely worth checking out, but don't pay for it.
I'm way into the soundtrack for sure. I'm a big jazz fusion fan and I can see why people hold it in such esteem.
I'd heard of Rage Racer in the past but didn't know it was part of this series - I had guessed from the name that it was some kind of car combat game.
I tried using some of the grip cars in R4 last night but don't really like them now that I'm used to the drift style. Feels like understeer city, but I was using the slowest car. Will have to try some faster ones to get a proper feel for it.
I've watched some gameplay of RR7 and it looks like you're basically forced to drift through most corners.
It's hard to get a feel for the changes in driving style without playing it, but I've read that 7 is pretty different compared to 4 or 5?
edit: Watched some more videos and I can now see that there are three different styles in 7!
I guess the first video I watched was a particularly touchy mode (plus the person playing wasn't very good). :P
Been playing MC2 and 3 and remembering why I love them so much.
If Rockstar gave a shit about the series I'd love a new one. Maybe they will release a 'remaster' to gauge interest in a sequel some day?
I wouldn't even care if they didn't do much to it. Just upscale for modern TVs and lock all three games to 60 fps and I'll be ecstatic.
Playing MC2 still feels so good, but the framerate in 3 can get pretty rough. If it was at 60 that would be huge.
I know MC2 was available on Steam years ago but I think it's been delisted? Maybe I'll check GoG.
This is why I miss PS1, 2, and even 3 generation. Developers took more risks.
Although to be fair, I guess we are seeing a lot of that now with indie devs, which is great to see. AAA seems to be the same old stuff every year though.
Indies are romanticized as this last bastion of creativity, and while they are very different from AAA games, they're not that dissimilar from each other.
Hey, I remember this game. The PS1 era was really wacky back then.
Steam: betsuni7
This game uses the Gex 3 engine. It was a pretty beefy engine for the PS1.
Yeah. It is one of those rare DreamWorks games. I guess that studio died.
Maybe, but don't let the ones not taking risks drown out the ones that are. They often have nothing to lose and are labors of love more than anything and we often benefit from that. We can't often say that for big name publishers anymore, but that's probably more on us as gamers than anything for buying the same recycled crap year after year.
oh I think I remember this! it was fun if it's the game I'm thinking of
Sonic Mega Collection upscales to 480i. Though it seems like it can be easily hacked to 240p.
I was manually unlocking the games on the PS2. That is a pain. You have to open and close games 20 times. I also tried a save game that unlocked everything on the PS2 emulator.
I need to find a way to copy saves from the PC to the PS2.
Yeah. It was a pain finding one without a scratched up disc. For some reason, the condition was not that good on them.
The only problem with the one I bought was stickers on the case, but I can remove those with some alcohol.
I played some of Akuji.
here's an amazing battle arena rarity. Poy Poy
also Azure Dreams was a pretty difficult turn based roguelike
and if you have a bunch of ps1 discs then you gotta flex with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Rancher_(video_game)
which let you scan other ps1 discs for monsters.
there's one ps1 game i'm trying to remember that was like full-contact basketball battle but you were robots or mutants or aliens or something..
edit: oh shit, it was PITBALL
No joke about weird niche games.
It was home to on
Pitball was the best!
Playstation felt like the unique home of this weird genre of semi-3D, combat-forward platforming games like this and Tai Fu.
There's apparently a really good Monater Rancher for Gamecube that I always meant to track down, but it's even more rare and expensive than the others, these days.
I loved them, but going back, they are slooooow
They did.
I actually started playing 4 at a friend's and I really enjoyed it. Wonder if Maximum Tune and Initial D's arcade story modes decided to build on RR's foundation. MT's has dialogue in the middle of the races, and lots of neat interactive events(like rivals showing up halfway into the race). Heck, I imagine a lot of RR's team are probably on the MT team, since it's also Namco.