My God, it’s full of cars

The mid-nineties were a time of major upheaval in my life. For a very short time I was living on my own, surviving on a diet of soup and single-malt whiskey while somehow holding down a full time job fixing computers.

During this time, at least while I was sober, entertainment mostly consisted of listening to emulated SID tunes on my by-now venerable Amiga A500, playing rubbish platformers on my SNES and watching obscure Hong Kong action movies.

Change needed to come, and when it eventually did come, it was huge.

How I got the machine is a story for another day, but by the ass-end of 1994 I had an imported Japanese PlayStation sat in front of my telly-box. At this time, there really weren’t many games available, in fact I bought the only two that the shop had when I got the console but it really didn’t matter - I only wanted to play one of them. I had seen the future and it was fast, fluid, let you play ‘Galaxian’ while it loaded and all the text was in Japanese! It was f**king sweet.

Now, it’s really quite hard to explain how much of a game changer this was in terms of technology to someone who wasn’t around to see it, so here’s a little context. This was the most bestest 3D arcade racing game you could play at home without buying an arcade cabinet before Ridge Racer appeared.

And all the custom chippery needed to push those 9,000 polygons at three-and-a-half frames per second meant that the cartridge for this bad boy cost over £100. That’s £205.49 in todays money! At least according to this random inflation calculator I found, but it’s on the internet so it must be right..

Now look at this little beauty! Yes, there’s a reason it’s black and white, I’ll get to that in a bit.

That’s thirty frames of around 90,000 textures per second right there, with actual music from, like, a CD or something! And it played every bit as good as it looked.

The set up

Cars, racing.

I’m not too sure why. I think there’s some back story later in the series, but for now once you’ve picked your car, and decided how hard you want the circuit to be, it’s just pure arcade style all-or-nothing racing to the end.

The execution

In almost every way this is a stunning conversion of the arcade original. Really, the only issue would be with the controls.

Ridge racer is not really a simulator. You can try and race properly, apex the corners and time your braking and gear shifts to hit the perfect speed and line, but you will lose. This is a game that rewards drifting, ridiculous amounts of drifting. In the arcades you have a high level of control since you play with an analogue steering wheel, the original PlayStation controllers however are not analogue so getting the steering lock right in order to drift the corner perfectly requires precise timing. This lack of certainty means that the game can be unpredictable, which only makes winning sweeter, and gives you a plausible reason to blame the console when it decides to b**ch-slap you with the pink Mappy as you turn into the second tunnel section on hard because for some reason your car decides to snap randomly out of its drift half way round. Or that could just be me, I suppose.

Then there’s the whole black and white thing.

So, there I was, finally other people have a reason endure my company, and I had both a game loud enough to drown out the pity-murmuring and a reason to get dressed on days off, but the console only seemed to display in black and white. I did a little digging, turned out that the Japanese don’t use the same broadcast standards as the U.K. (Well, Duh!) and so while my expensive-but-crappy Toshiba T.V. from back in the day could show the picture, it couldn’t decode the colour information. Was I down? Nah, if you drink enough, fall over and catch the side of your head on the coffee table and then squint through the pain you can see, and taste, all sorts of colour! Everywhere!

Also, as I found out a few months later, if you just get an RGB adapter and use that it all kinda works fine.

Buyers remorse

Ridge Racer is a game I spent hours and hours playing, over and over. I was once actually quite good at it, it filled me with the sort of joy I once though only came from fuzzy VHS shame or a multi-pack of Sour cream Pringles. It is, however, quite limited in scope. It only has one track, with two configurations. If you suck at Galaxian it only has four cars, if you don’t you still only get twelve. The CD only has 6 music tracks on it, and one of them is kinda rubbish (Rotterdam nation, I’m looking at you) although as the actual game fits entirely in the consoles memory you can take the CD out and put in one of your own (Wooo! Where’s the Hansen album?)

It’s a great example of doing one thing, and doing it really well.

Unfortunately this does slightly limit the long-term replay value proposition, even back in the day I eventually drifted (You see what I did there!) away from it and began a dark beat-em-up and survival horror phase from which I only really emerged late in my thirties.

So?

I fired this up for the first time decades and was immediately transported back to my hazy alcoholic twenties. I could remember every bend, every drift and the soundtrack raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Unfortunately, my decrepit fingers coupled with the cheap controller I’m using do not make for a precision driving experience.

This, however, did not stop me playing non-stop for almost four hours.

Now watch as I now expertly obtain all 12 cars with my L33t Galaxian skillz and then fail to make a single clean lap by driving like an uncoordinated meth addict with no hands. Yay me!

(Cover image courtesy of Dante Ali / The Cover Project)

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