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Released for the Nintendo 64 on February 14, 2000 by Nintendo, and
developed by Nintendo Software Technology, Ridge Racer 64 is a
3D racer, featuring a heavy emphasis on drifting
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While they were always driving in the shadow of the Playstation's 1997
classic,
Gran Turismo, the Nintendo 64's stable of racing games,
throughout a huge group of sub-genres, is quite strong. 2000's
Ridge Racer 64 showed up a little late to the party, but it's a valuable
addition the N64 racing lineup.
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If you've played this game, you can hear this image
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Let's start with the good. For running on a console sometimes known for
slowdown,
Ridge Racer 64 is blazing fast. The sense of speed in this
game is incredible, enough to sometimes overwhelm my aging reflexes. Graphical
detail isn't entirely sacrificed to achieve this effect, either, nor is there
any frame rate slowdown. While the cars and environments can get a little
pixelated, they're still detailed and look good. Surroundings often include
moving 3D objects, like waterfalls, a circling helicopter, and a low-flying
jet. Little details like brake lights are just right. While the game doesn't
quite amaze like its graphically stunning N64 peer,
World Driver Championship, which moves just as fast, and seems to
sacrifice nothing in terms of graphical quality,
Ridge Racer 64 still
looks quite good.
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Moments like these make me feel like I'm in an action movie
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The sound design also enhances the sense of speed. I'll make a strange
recommendation here: try to play this game while listening through headphones.
The boom of car engines, unique for each model, is magnificent. Car engines
coming up behind you, car engines to your left and your right. The most
impressive moment comes when you're driving through a tunnel with windows as a
jet flies by. All the roaring car engines are buffeted and echoing in the
tunnel, the jet engine bellows through over the game's fun and uptempo techno
soundtrack, and it sounds like the foundations of the earth are trembling.
Awesome.
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Tail lights in the night, exchanging glances
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The gameplay is also enjoyably immediate. To start, you're given access
to three cars of varying stats, along with three different tracks. The three
cars' stats include speed, acceleration, handling, and grip, and the player
can choose whichever car they're most comfortable with, as well as the car's
color scheme.
Ridge Racer 64's Grand Prix formula then becomes clear:
get first place to clear a course; clear all three courses, and another set of
three courses are unlocked...along with three new cars...sort of.
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I don't know why I take such strange pleasure in selecting a car
named "Red" and switching its color scheme to yellow. Such is
life.
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In what I think might be the game's coolest element, you've got to race
against each of the new cars you unlock and beat them in order to use them.
The gameplay loop of unlocking new, more difficult tracks, then needing to
gain access to the better cars in order to win on these tracks, is a lot of
fun. The controls and physics engine at the service of this loop are solid,
splitting the difference between arcade and simulation. Your car smashes into
walls and other cars without taking damage of any sort, but you also can't
just unrealistically turn on a dime, either. Learning how to drift through
corners becomes key, as the courses become tighter and more difficult to
navigate. Drifting entails taking your foot...er finger off the accelerator
for a brief moment, then correctly steering out of the drift so that your car
doesn't spin out.
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Marry him/Marry me/I'm the one that loved you, baby, can't you
see?
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Unfortunately, as I've stated in other reviews, I am not great a racing
games. They, along with fighting games, are my genre Achilles heels, even if I
greatly enjoy playing them. I could never become great at this game, or at
drifting, but I was able to at least UNLOCK all of the expert tracks and cars.
Unfortunately, there's a short shelf life for this game for two reasons,
whether or not you're good at racing games or not. The first is that you'll
soon realize this game only has three tracks. Each set of three tracks that
are unlocked are just variations on the previous three tracks. The time of day
might change, certain paths, generally ones that are harder to navigate, are
opened, but at their heart, they're the same tracks: a seaside one, a mountain
one, and a desert one. That's it.
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Though I'll gladly take those options over a garbage dump, Bourbon
Street sewer, and the Waffle House on College Drive after 10 pm
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This leads into the second reason this game is short: if you
are good, you're going to blaze through all these tracks and unlock all
the vehicles in a couple of days at most. If you're bad or just okay, after
you've played for a couple of days, you're going to unlock most of the cars,
and reach a point to where you've unlocked enough tracks to realize it's just
the same three over and over again, and you don't have much reason to press on
with the game outside of pride. Whether you're an amateur or an expert, you
won't be playing
Ridge Racer 64 for long...
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I should mention here, you can choose between a first-person,
third-person closeup, and third-person zoomed out view throughout
each race, and also select what music track you want to hear during
the race at the start of each race. If you can play this game from
the first-person perspective, you have the reflexes of a cat on
cocaine.
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Unless you love the control and drift system (you have the option to
slightly alter the drift system to your liking), or really enjoy the
multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode gives plenty of viewing options (you
can even go widescreen!) and runs pretty well, even when you add some bots for
you and your friend to race against. It's not bad. You can also look at all of
your cars and trophies in the game's garage, which would be more exciting if
you could tinker with the cars more, or level them up.
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| Nothing like driving through the desert in my YELLOW Xevious Red |
I can see why someone who really clicks with this game would want to keep coming back to it,
but for everyone else,
Ridge Racer 64 is short and sweet. It doesn't have the depth of a
World
Driver Championship, and it certainly doesn't look as slick, but
Ridge Racer 64 is definitely more immediate, and far easier to pick up and play for a newcomer.
This racing game amateur enjoyed it and its exciting blast of Y2K energy.
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| And hey, if you can't beat the computer-controlled racers, maybe you can always beat a friend. Oh, the reviews is over? I guess this last caption will have to mention the computer driver AI. If you keep the game's collision physics turned on, cars in front of you will often swerve so that you can't pass them without running into their bumper, which will launch them forward and push you backward...but the game gives you the option to turn the collision physics off, making passing far easier...of course, if you can't catch up to the first place driver, which I often could not in the expert tracks, the collision physics don't matter much! |
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