Seriously Sideways
Way back in the mid to late 1990s, when I first got a PlayStation, I owned
Ridge Racer, the port of the arcade racer designed to show that the consoles could do just as much as the cabinets could. If you squinted and ignored this or that. It was a great little game, holding plenty of attention until
Gran Turismo made itself known, and then never being heard of again.
Ridge Racer Type 4 capped off the console generation with a game arguably better than
Gran Turismo, assuming you wanted arcade-style racing. Long before that point, however, the
Ridge Racer series was effectively dead to me.
When the PlayStation Portable came to town in 2005 for us Europeans,
Ridge Racer was there once more to show off the power of the handheld in a compilation game of sorts,
Ridge Racer, or
Ridge Racers in its original Japanese.
Yeah, the naming isn't brilliant for this series. Still, I can get behind a game that gathers together the best bits of a series, mainly because I a) only remember a single track from
Ridge Racer and b) didn't pick it up for the PSP until a few years ago, second hand. My launch title of choice was
Archer Maclean's Mercury if you wanted to know.
Right, let's get these wheels sliding.
