I tried playing it back in 2013 for 20 minutes. 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. When I bought it I did know it was not really a Ridge Racer game. Looking it up, it says here I bought it back in the first day of 2013 in a bundle for $11.89. I'm not sure when exactly I bought Ridge Racer Unbounded for Steam. Which as most people who have bought it will know by now, is not true. But paying $15 felt like I was entitled to some content. And when I bought it I knew that it was going to be very blocked by DLC. I ended up buying the Vita Ridge Racer knowing it was basically the same shit. 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.
That was the same as the PSP game, except the controls were hot garbage and the content was mostly blocked.
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. The music was exciting and the graphics looked beautiful. 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. Even boring ass games like Sega Rally, which was mildly entertaining for a couple of hours, but then it became an annoying chore. I have good memories of DualShocking racing games anyway. I didn't really get the whole deal with drifting properly at first anyway. Same thing with Ridge Racer whatever, the first one I tried on the PS1. I couldn't stand the idea of playing Gran Turismo for longer than it was interesting. I like playing them in bursts, but I don't like committing to them.
And for me, thus far, it's made a great impression.It's not that I loved Ridge Racer when I got the PSP. With a wide open 2012 launch window, there's still plenty of time for Namco and Bugbear to convince gamers that Unbounded is a worthy competitor to arcade racing's most recent titans ( Need for Speed and Burnout, namely). Which isn't to say those tracks can't be recreated using the race builder mode, of course.
They were sure to point out, however, that Unbounded will ship with brand new tracks rather refreshing classics as other main series Ridge Racer games have.
Reps from Namco couldn't tell me whether the final game would include a feature close to my heart, manual transmission support (yes, even in arcade-style racing games). Not that you can just go around crashing into people and things constantly, as your car takes damage from most interactions - a fully destroyed car is penalized with precious race time, offering a risk/reward twist to the game's, um, twist. This effect was compounded when boost came into play, either assisting me to nudge someone out of the way (and into an abutment) or allowing me to straight up blast through designated areas. Around turns, I found myself repeatedly fired into a corner or spun around, often due to my lack of foresight. In Unbounded, other players come after you. The demo build was unfortunately locked in the automatic transmission setting, but the assistance of a drift button allowed me to characteristically slide around turns and past other cars. It combines elements of both Split/Second and Need for Speed to concoct a hybrid Ridge Racer experience like none before, and - at least thus far - creates a surprisingly refined experience as a result.%Gallery-130924%I wasn't given a chance to check out Unbounded's craziest addition to the Ridge Racer series, track creation, but was instead offered a brief playthrough of one of the game's Bugbear Entertainment-developed levels. Sure, Unbounded's driving still leans heavily on drifting, and the soundtrack is still composed of bouncy, synthetic beats, but Unbounded is an entirely different beast from previous entries in the series. You know Ridge Racer, right? It's that arcade racing stalwart that occasionally revives itself for a new platform launch or awkward update, but consistently delivers drift-heavy, if not somewhat stale, racing mechanics? Or maybe you know it like I do, as a game to occasionally obsess over, to replay over and over while its electronica soundtrack bounces along in the background.Įither way, Ridge Racer Unbounded is none of those things.