Mega Derived

After you complete all the hundred-odd races that you can see at the start of the game, the game unlocks another hundred-odd races. Only these ones are ball-achingly hard. I’m no expert at racing games, and it really shows. I have a lot of difficulty in winning pretty much all of them. I’ve won two races on the expert circuit, after a good thirty attempts.

This game is hard

One word: TERRORISTS.

It’s a good game, and I like it, but there’s so many sloppy little bits here and there that are annoying. Chiefly, Ubisoft’s insistence on using an inferior version of the Unreal Engine for multiplayer. What I don’t understand is how multiplayer is being pitched as Vegas’s main selling point; you play a spiffy looking single-player game and then it dumps you into this rough, decrepit hell hole. I imagine you could probably pull off the multiplayer graphics on the original Xbox. Graphics don’t make the game, obviously, but they certainly don’t hurt. Sure, I get the argument that there’s no way the server code can handle 16 players AND produce such nice graphics, but they should work around that. There’s got to be something they can do. Other than that, multiplayer is pretty neat.

Let’s just compare the visuals, shall we? Here’s two images I shamelessly lifted off the internet. See if you can guess which is which:

Single player, while doing justice to my ludicrously expensive games machine, is about twenty minutes long. Blink and you’ll honestly miss it. I regret not playing it through on Realistic difficulty because at least then i’d probably still have some levels left to do. You start off fighting some nasty terrorists in Mexico, which is a boring level, then you do some levels in Las Vegas - which are all pretty good fun - and then you finish off the game at the Nevada Dam. With a fairly enjoyable level. There’s only six. It just doesn’t feel right. I’ll break it to you now; this game ends on a massive cliffhanger. It’s half a game. It really is. It’s even worse than Halo 2. You’re thinking “ooh, this will get pretty good now” and them BAM it’s all over and you’re left watching the credits roll while they work away on the sequel, which they’ll demand another forty quid for. Don’t worry though, it’ll be £25 new within 3 months if it’s the same length as this one.

Gameplay wise, it’s sweet. I’d write about the story but it’s entirely inconsequential. Okay, then, I’ll give it a go: nasty terrorists are attacking Las Vegas. There we go. You run around trying to stop them, often with the music getting you into the mood. The atmosphere the game builds often is a real treat. Vegas is another game that employs a cover system, just like GRAW and Gears of War, and it again works to great effect. I enjoyed playing it, anyway. Rappelling down lines, breaching doors, shooting up evil terrorists with MP5’s, that’s all fun. It’s a good game. Its success lies in its set pieces and the way you go about attacking them. And a lot of them are really fun. You get to an especially good bit and it will play some of that aforementioned nice tense music in the background to remind you of how cool you are. So, fun game. But it’s such a bloody short one. Ubisoft are effectively turning the Tom Clancy games franchise into a factory, pumping out regular updates and saturating the market beyond all logic. As much as I liked shooting the terrorists this time, and with Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and with GRAW, I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be in the mood to blast away any more Mexicans (they’re always Mexican. I think Ubisoft hates Mexico) for a good while. Which can’t bode well for GRAW 2, which is due out any month now. Their formula won’t work forever; compare Vegas to Gears of War and it feels sloppier, rougher around the edges and, frankly, less fun to play. It’s been pushed to the sidelines in Gears’s wake, and rightly so. While it’s fun, it’s not that fun.

Ridge Racer 6 is a fascinating little title that, as far as I can tell, was lost almost entirely in a world that worked itself into a PGR3 launch frenzy. Unlike Bizzare Creations, however, Namco could actually make a racing game that ran at 60fps. But, still, the game is virtually unplayed. It’s also bloody hard. You wouldn’t think so at first, as you rocket around corners without having to do anything else but occasionally let go of the accelerator. No, at first, Ridge Racer 6 seems like a dumb game.

It’s not.

If you don’t believe me, why don’t YOU try and complete the World Xplorer mode? That’s essentially the meat of this title. Again, at first it seems weird and alien. You’re dropped into a bizarre hexagonal grid. I spent the first two hours of the game expecting Bob Holness to spring out at me and ask me some questions. It seems basic, yet complicated. Which is confusing in itself. There are 108-odd hexagons sprawling out in a spider-diagram like shape from 01. The paths higher up are harder. The further right you move, the faster the cars get. Yet, the game’s introduction encourages you to ‘chain’ together various races. Why? I’ve got no idea, I don’t think it changes the game whatsoever. The bottom route (the route we all do first, no matter how good we are at racing games) is, admittedly, pretty simple. You see the courses. You meet the cars. It’s all good. It won’t challenge you, and it won’t get your blood pumping. You need to push past that. Ridge Racer 6 is all about the later levels, where you’re fighting every corner for those few milliseconds that will guarantee you victory in the race. Late in the game, fumbling a single corner results in your failure. It starts a nice game, sure, but it ends a mean one.

The gameplay is basic. More basic than your average racing game. You don’t actually need the brake. It’s only there because Namco thought it would be a good laugh. You see, if you press the brake button, you might as well just lose the race. I spent a good hour or so thinking that in order to fly the car into drift mode i needed to brake slightly. No. That isn’t the case at all. Fly into a corner at full speed, let go of the accelerator, turn the car a bit, hold the accelerator down again. That’s all you do. Honest to god. This is effective; it makes the games about the tracks. Instead of fiddling with controls, or trying to make it realistic, Ridge Racer 6 is all about its own universe. Look at the screen, not the pad. You get better at the game by performing the right powerslides, perfecting them, making them an artform.

If this sounds wrong to you, don’t let it disparage you. It’s a fun game. It’s pretty. The tracks are detailed, colourful and varied. That’s more than a lot of 360 racing games can say. You can get a good few hours of racing out of Ridge Racer 6. And you should.