It's not that I loved Ridge Racer when I got the PSP. I liked it. I had played it for a couple of hours. That's my thing with driving games. I like playing them in bursts, but I don't like committing to them. I couldn't stand the idea of playing Gran Turismo for longer than it was interesting. Same thing with Ridge Racer whatever, the first one I tried on the PS1. It was ok. Fun even. I didn't really get the whole deal with drifting properly at first anyway.
I have good memories of DualShocking racing games anyway. Even boring ass games like Sega Rally, which was mildly entertaining for a couple of hours, but then it became an annoying chore. But Ridge Racer was one of the first games I got for the PSP (together with Tony Hawk Underground 2), mostly because the demo UMD that came with the console felt great. The music was exciting and the graphics looked beautiful. So I got the thing and played the hell out of it, enough to get all the stupid extras I think were locked, like I don't know, a PacMan car or whatever. I like Ridge Racer games. They're good fun. Not the iPad version of the game though. That was the same as the PSP game, except the controls were hot garbage and the content was mostly blocked. That's fine though, they have to make money somehow, and there's enough fans out there who can keep consuming the same old bullshit. I mean that's fine. I ended up buying the Vita Ridge Racer knowing it was basically the same shit. And when I bought it I knew that it was going to be very blocked by DLC. But paying $15 felt like I was entitled to some content. Which as most people who have bought it will know by now, is not true.
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I'm not sure when exactly I bought Ridge Racer Unbounded for Steam. Looking it up, it says here I bought it back in the first day of 2013 in a bundle for $11.89. When I bought it I did know it was not really a Ridge Racer game. I mean I read it was a FlatOut game but the only time I played FlatOut I only spent, what, 10 minutes with it? Still, Burnout, Need for Speed, I knew more or less what it was about. I tried playing it back in 2013 for 20 minutes. Back then my computer was working like crap because I hadn't changed the cooling paste, which I only did last year. It's not that I mind. I don't play that many games anymore. I think the worst thing about it was that my computer was running Vista, which is Latvian for Chicken.
Anyway, I decided to give it another go, with my computer working decently. I remembered more or less what it felt like playing this game. Twenty minutes give you enough of an impression to know if you'll actually like a racing game.
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Racing games are like news anchors. You don't need much to know if you'll stand it for long. If they're jerks, you'll stick watching them just to complain and to laugh at their bad opinions or the way they stop before the last word of a sentence and change the inflection like if "died" were a good punchline (as in "Woman in California lost for 3 decades was found... *dead*" with a stupid fucking cadence in the end). But a racing game that you don't like will only express its shitty opinions and laughable intonations in ways that it will feel it's your fault. When it forces you to ram your rival it actually forces you to drift in places where you don't want to drift and to get close to other cars in order to waste time and energy focusing on something that is not the main objective of a race. That's bullshit. A bad news anchor with shitty opinions in foreign policy will not force you to adopt their views, they will manipulate you into doing so. A racing game has only so many potential outlets though, so its bad views will effectively manipulate you into doing something that may not be optimal to your game plan. It's ok if you enjoy it though. I'm not saying you wouldn't. What I'm saying is that the framing of the game is condensed in making it a bad racing game with bad combat mechanics.
But let me characterize bad.
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Say, a racing game has to have some added difficulty for you to compete. If all cars were just as fast, you'd probably do ok, but the challenge would be dull. If other cars are slightly faster, it will drive you to get better cars and make better decisions. However, decision making is only possible in a game within a certain framework of possible actions. If your options are: Do a perfect drifting or lose, then you'll have to stand by the option of doing the perfect drifting in order to actually be able to play.
There's a point to progression being difficult, I'd imagine. There's no point to making combat feel bad when you're holding your stick. And there's little point to make drifting ineffective when you need it to work right. The old Ridge Racer games understood this last point, so the hardships of the game were based on correct decision making regarding drifting before you approached a curve. It wasn't always fair, sure. But the drifting in this newer game felt annexed for the namesake. I'm sure someone said 'well, it's Ridge Racer, so let's feature drifting prominently', to which someone answered 'uh, but we don't have a good engine for that?' But who cares anyway.
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What makes this game shitty? It's hard, but it doesn't feel fair. The initial cars are bad, and competing with them is simply not enough. You can grind that out, but grinding is not for the car games I like. Or for any game I like I think. But added to the confusion of drifting as an exercise in futility, I can't fathom rereturning to this game. I may, once I forget about it. But for now I choose to lose.
