(I and II)
Racing is my second favorite game catgegory following RPGs. I just love driving in any form, really.
It's been so long since I've played this one that I don't even know if I should put a review in. If you've read my other reviews, you have probably seen a trend. I say quite a few games are on the plus side of okay, but don't recommend the purchase of many. Whether this is because I'm just wishy-washy, a terrible reviewer, or right is for you to judge. My opinon on this one is an okay, but leans toward the downside of okay. Lack of cars, anyone? Having a Viper that can shoot someone is pretty cool, and that alone makes it good for at least one playing session. I don't recall if there's a 2-player or link option, but if there is that would be fun. I played it solo, anyway. Unless you're a big fan of racing or cars equipped with machine guns, pass this one up.
A game with more hype than it deserved, methinks. Not a disaster, but by no means a triumph, either. I'll divide into good points and bad points. First, the good.
The best part about this game, and its sequel, The Need For Speed II, is the cars. You get to drive the most drooled-over cars in the world. Viper, Corvette, F50 (if memory serves), RX-7, 911 Turbo, and others. NFSII consists wholly of supercars from houses such as Italdesign. The other good part that comes to mind is the freeway track. Speed demons, this is the course for you. More straigtaways than the Dakota prairie. Of course, more curves than said prairie as well. Blistering speed is the name of the game on this chunk o' asphalt.
Bad parts are equally elusive in this mediocre offering. First off, limited course selection is a bit frustrating after awhile. I forget how many there are, but I'm thinking there are nine. Three easy, three intermediate, and three advanced. The next downfall I'll mention is a boon as well. The differences between the cars are both beneficial and disheartening. The largest digression from model to model is top speed, and with it acceleration. Next is handling. The handling is interesting. Differences are apparent, but not very intuitive. You feel a bit more disconnected from the road than one might expect. One might also expect each car to be a little more well-rounded as far as the courses go. But each car, with a couple of exceptions, have a definite preference, ranging from mostly straight to sort of twisty to really twisty.
Unfortunately, I'm mostly talking out of my ass here since it's been so long since I've played. Any experienced reviewer will likely have realized this by now. So don't base any purchase decisions about this game and its equally mediocre sequel upon my opinions. I'd hate to have that on my head.
By far this is my favorite installment of the Ridge Racer series. It easily eclipses sisters Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer Revolution. Graphics are superb, as is the animation. Namco nearly outdid itself here by producing an arcade racer that will be very hard to follow up. Perhaps they won't try for a fourth series installment.
Graphic style is similar to the previous offerings in the series, though cleaner and more fluid. There's also the added bonus of the rather attractive ladies that stand next to your car at the beginning of each race. Since I don't have any graphical gripes about this one, I'll go on to cars. I like how the cars were done here. You can select a graphic for your racing "team" from a library or create your own if you're so inclined. You can also choose a color scheme for each vehicle individually. There are two colors used on each pocket rocket, and you can choose any combination you wish. Beyond the superficial, the way you acquire new cars is fairly standard. You have a choice of three (I believe) "free" cars in the beginning. With the points you earn by winning races you can buy a new car or upgrade your old one. While you don't get to choose what the upgrades are (a la Tokyo Highway Battle), you do get to keep all your old cars, upgrades and all. There are four imaginary companies that manufacture the vehicles in this game. One is the American firm Lizard (I know, not very good name choice on Namco's part). These vehicles are built around good old-fashioned American excess. Lots of horsepower, speed, and acceleration, but a little on the low side as far as control. Think '60s musclecar type manners. There's also a French auto house that produces diminutive vehicles that don't go too fast, but hang on to the asphalt like nobody's business. Picture Renault as far as looks. We also have a BMW-ish German company called Gnade that makes more all-around cars. There's only one in the game, and I don't use it much. Finally Italy makes an appearance in the form of Assoluto, with furiously fast cars that don't forgive anyone in the corners. They're not as bad as the Americans, though, and look damn cool.
A neat trick in this game is customizing the amount of grip your tires have. A big technique in this game is oversteer (drift) cornering. The Lizard pickup (yes, a pickup) is especially notorious for this. In this method of cornering, you swing your rear end out and slide around the corner. It's faster than "grip" cornering, but damn is it tough. I haven't been able to get it yet. Less grippy tires obviously favor "drift" cornering.
All my gripes aside from collision detection and drift difficulty reside in the tracks of this game. There aren't any. That may be an exaggeration, but it's closer to true than one might expect. All four courses are different routes through the same environment. As far as that goes, Namco did well in pulling some variety from this interesting, albeit limited, concept. The other gripe is what happens when you get to the edge of the track. You CANNOT go outside of the boundaries of the road. You even bounce off curbs. Even when there is no curb you can't run your car off the tar. I know this is an arcade-style game, but a little realism in this area, please. What makes this especially annoying is that it makes tough corners even more unforgiving, in addition to slowing you down much more than alternate terrain for a few yards would.
The difficulty curve works very well. The beginning races are rather easy, but at least the game doesn't get impossible all at once. What happens is once you place in the top three in all the races of your current class, you move on to the next class, where the other racers have progressively faster cars and progressively better driving styles. I only played the game with a standard control pad, and I think that the only way to win it all is with the MadCatz wheel and pedals. At any rate, as with most driving games, competitive racing requires analog controls. Too bad all games aren't compatible. (That's one thing I like about N64, analog control on every game!) Arcade racing fans, go get this title and start your engines!
The Champion of PSX Racers title went to this game when it was released. Graphics, animation, and control were the best in its class, pardon the car ad lingo. It has now been succeeded by other titles, and isn't quite the sparkling gem it once was. It is still good, though, and one of the best arcade ports I've seen for any system. The worst is Cruis'n USA for N64, followed closely by Daytona Racing on Saturn (though some may dispute me on that last one). Graphic fluidity and animation smoothness remain good even among later offerings from other companies. But being a nearly completely formulaic arcade-style racer, it has requisite console shortcomings, mainly lack of wheel and pedals and limited selection of cars and tracks. This game could benefit from link play, and it may support that, I'm not sure. Racers always gain some life when you can play against someone. Just look at the original Super Mario Kart for SNES. Good game, but go for Ridge Racer Revolution or Rage Racer if you're looking for something like this.
Some Ridge Racer pics
Namco had a good thing going with the original Ridge Racer, and they did not mess with success in its sequel. We have Ridge Racer Turbo here, with all apologies to Street Fighter II Turbo for making fun of the Street Fighter franchise. The return of RR brings us new vehicles, new tracks, and a better game to stare at for a while. Almost everything about this game can be said of its older sibling, so I'll refer you to the above review if you feel you need some more in-depth (insert snickering at myself for calling one of my reviews "in-depth" here) commentary.
Not a game I recommend buying, really. This is a basic racer for the most part. But you only have one opponent per race. Beating people reveals "new" tracks and opponents against whom to compete. A drawback of this game is car customization. You can make simple, painless mods to your vehicle. There are 12 of said vehicles (I think) in the game's garage, only 4 of which are available depending upon racing class. Even the low-level ones can be made into kick-ass machines, but when you buy a different car, the old one is lost completely. You can't go back to it. You have to buy it again and remodify. And then you've lost your OTHER car. Sucky, huh? Tracks are boring at times, and your opponent seems to get the same mods you make, so mods are almost pointless. They're not really, but it sometimes seems that way when you get a 10 mph greater top speed but you still can't catch up with the son of a bitch in front of you because he got a speed boost, too. A neat feature is being able to name the models of cars. In the beginning, they are only Type 1, Type 2, etc. And each is modeled after a real Japanese sports car. The most easily identifiable is the Miata. A fun game to a point. Graphically adequate with unspectacular control, animation, and sound. A renter if I've ever seen one.
What we have here, my friends, is a definite PlayStation classic. What says "PLAYSTATION" more loudly (Besides Cloud Stife or Crash Bandicoot) than a maniacal clown with an ice cream truck shooting napalm ice cream cones? That's right, there isn't much. For awhile, this game was completely unique. Sure, cars that can blow each other away is nothing new. But this game does it without the track. And, as such, it doesn't really qualify as a pure racing game. But it's a race to send the rest of the contenders to the scrap heap using a sometimes dizzying array of available weapons.
I love cars, and I really love the cars in this game. Aside from the monster truck and the Hummer, each vehicle has a unique way to inflict mucho damage on opponents. There's a dune buggy that fires acidic slime. A sidecar motorcycle sends off screaming skulls from the depths of hell. Mr. Ice Cream Man will annihilate you with flaming cones of frozen dairy delight. A cabbie tosses Molotov Cocktails. The police car has an omnidirectional tazer. A pink lowrider has a couple of flamethrowers mounted in front that tend to burn you to a crisp. And there are less interesting ones as well. You also get missles, freeze missles, homing missles, really powerful missles (that don't home in), mines, tire spikes, springs, oil slicks, rear-fire missles, rear flames, and . . . . There may be others, but I don't remember them right now.
Another thing about the vehicles is that they have gargantuan differences in demeanor. As you would expect, handling and speed are gained at the sacrifice of armor, and vice versa. There are enough vehicles with enough combinations of this rule to find an appropriate means of destruction for any player. Skill, style, and other attributes of player and player's ride sometimes take a backseat to special weapon power. Special weapons can make or break anyone. The best beginning vehicle is Hammerhead. This monster truck handles like an oil tanker, (it loses the worst-handling title to only Sweet Tooth, the ice cream man) but has lots of armor and a no-brainer special weapon. You run over people. And inflict lots of damage. And you don't have to press the fire button, it's automatic. Complete no-brainer. But you only get a few charges at once, though the number builds back up on its own eventually. But you can still damage people pretty heavily by running over them normally. This is really long already, so I won't describe any more cars.
While the game is a blast to play, it doesn't exactly set any new standards in graphics. Everything is really flat and completely lacks good textures. But as such, animation doesn't really have anything in the way. Animation still screws up, though. The walls tend to disappear momentarily at times. Otherwise everything moves really smoothly, and load time is mostly non-existent (surprise). Soundtrack is a mostly one-sided affair in favor of hard rock guitar music, but that's damned appropriate. There's one track that deviates from that trend, and it incorporates a doomsday-ish sound of some chimes reciting a bar or two from "Jingle Bells" in an ominous-souding minor key. It's a very dark tune, and is used in a very dark round, the Warehouse District. It's Christmas here, and there's even a Santa you can run over! Mr. Grinch would love this one. There's also "refs" in various places of various battlegrounds that show up and shoot you with missile launchers or machine guns, but you can run them over, too. It's very satisfying.
It seems I've rambled on about this game more than I intended. Which is okay, because I don't have that much to say about Twisted Metal 2. I didn't like it very much. Other people thought it was a big improvement over the first, but I just didn't like it nearly as well as the first. There's an improvement in the flatness of the graphics, but not quite enough. I also preferred the "photos" of the drivers in the original versus the cartoony drawings in this version. I'd complain that the ice cream truck is missing in this one, but he's really not. You just need a code to get him. I was really let down, and I can't even explain why. I guess it comes down to personality, and this game doesn't have it in as much abundance as the original. Play TWI (read: buy it) and maybe rent TWII. But otherwise, leave the sequel on the shelf as far as I'm concerned. Especially since TWI is now on the PSX's Greatest Hits list and available for twenty bucks.
After procrastinating for about as long as I could, I bought this game, which also happens to be my first PSX racer. Strange, isn't it? Well, since racing is my second favorite genre and all. I still like it as much as when I first played. The review is very choppily written and a bit hard to read as such. I'll have to revamp it again sometime.
This racer takes place in the future and employs anti-gravity sled-like vehicles on some pretty neat tracks. Psygnosis managed to do a very good job of representing what such vehicles may handle like if they existed. And it takes some getting used to for all us people used to rubber on asphalt. A very cool aspect of this game is the soundtrack. This game was released well before the "electronica" craze reared its head. Of course, the soundtrack has drawn complaints from some reviewers as being to laid back for this fast-paced game. A good move by Psygnosis was to throw in redbook audio so the soundtrack can be played on an ordinary CD player. I've found myself occasionally popping the disc into the changer, sometimes for homework and at others for a soundtrack to an entirely different game. Graphics and animation are superb; at first glance the in-game graphics look like the rendered FMV in the introduction. (also impressive, I might add.) Backgrounds an vehicles are equally and lushly detailed. You can even fire various weapons at your opponents to slow them down, but they can shoot you, too, so watch out. This title, combined with its sequel, takes the crown as my favorite PSX racer ever. Uh, Gran Turismo aside. A very good, very original racer. 9 out of 10 if I was rating things. And since it's one of the PSX's Greatest Hits collection and priced at $20.00, I highly, highly recommend buying it as soon as humanly possible.
I haven't finished my Wipeout XL review yet. Check later. Much later. It may never come, for all I know.