by: John Olin

December 10, 2005

Ridge Racer 6 has always been a game that has displayed the technology of the system it was launching with. Specifically a Ridge Racer title has always come out with every single Sony system, gaining fairly good ratings, and displaying the technology pretty well. The last true Ridge Racer for home console was at the launch of PlayStation 2 with Ridge Racer 5 in 2000. Since then a few games have come out between these two, but they weren’t true sequels as much as extensions. Ridge Racer 6 has surprisingly come out at the launch of Xbox 360, and the extremely Japanese racer complete with insane drifting, nitrous, Pac Man, and dripping with nods to Namco’s arcade titles isn’t the technical beauty it could have been, but it is still a pretty well done title.

I didn’t really get into the whole Ridge Racer scene until “Ridge Racers” on PSP, and to be honest with you, this game, Ridge Racer 6 is nearly identical in everyway other than better controls, and visuals. Other than that, with Ridge Racer 6 you are getting a good experience. What works for the PSP though, a handheld, is a extremely good game for a handheld, but pretty much the exact gameplay on a home console isn’t exactly as good, but it still is extremely entertaining. The thing you have to learn about the game is, you don’t really need to try hard to steer, as every single car has fairly good steering, with only a few being a bit difficult to steer. To take corners, you put on the brake, simply by press the R trigger and then with the analog, you direct your car to drift. The drifting is even more insane than what you would expect in Project Gotham Racing 3 and serves two different purposes. Drifting makes sure that you do not lose a whole lot of speed, as long as you drift good. Also, when drifting, you fill up your nitrous that is on stand-by. You have three different cells of nitrous, which can be all fired off in one nitrous shot, or one at a time. Depending on how well you handle your car around corners, you gain more nitrous. If you drift from one corner to the other, you can easily fill up an entire cell.

In the beginning, the game is extremely easy, so easy that you could pass cars that are using nitrous at that time, but as you progress the tracks become a bit more tricky, although you never really feel like you are being challenged hard. The biggest challenge you will encounter isn’t the AI players but the actual tracks themselves. Barely bumping into the side of a track means you go from 200 MPH to 80 MPH in just a second. The game does a good job of aligning you automatically though, so this isn’t really a huge problem ever. The tracks themselves do have different variations, and will test you on how well you can drift, as that is the main point of the game, but there are also crazy drops, where you make go up a steep hill and go flying forty feet in the air, or just come to an end of the track and go flying off, slamming down hard on the pavement below but not really effecting your actual performance. Basically the vehicles in the game don’t behave as actual vehicles, and many of them behave the same, so it feels almost like you are playing with hotwheels cars. Still while the game is never so hard that you feel like there is no way to beat it, it gets appropriately challenging, if not too late. What is annoying though is there doesn’t seem to be too much variety in the tracks, and you will have done the same tracks at least a dozen times each, allowing you to memorize the nuances of each track.