32 Bits #1 and 2: Ridge Racer and The Raiden Project

32 Bits is a series about how the popular games of the past influenced gaming today. We’re currently in September 1995, and the Playstation has just launched in North America…

Playstation #1: Ridge Racer

Developed and published by Namco

Originally released for arcades (1993); US Playstation launch (September 9, 1995)

Best-seller in: America (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum), Japan (Playstation the Best)

I know what you’re thinking, so let’s get it out of the way.

RIIIIIIIIIDGE Racer. Ridge Racer!

At E3 2006, Sony CEO Kaz Hirai tried to stir up enthusiasm for the Playstation 3 and Playstation handhelds by appealing to the public’s nostalgia for Ridge Racer. He failed. Ironically, the game at the center of this moment of desperation was one of the first hits that made the Playstation in ‘95.

The two big hits in those early days were this game and Battle Arena Toshinden (covered next week). Both were packed in with the Playstation, but that’s not all they have in common. Both games are also similar, but slicker, than two of the Sega Saturn’s launch titles: the arcade ports Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter.

Imagine, in 1995, someone showing off their Saturn and another person displaying their Playstation. With the Saturn, you had…Daytona USA, a botched port of a favorite arcade game. It’s slow and ugly. Parts of the track just pop into view. Then there’s Ridge Racer. Same genre. Similar format and presentation. But it’s fast and colorful; it looks polished and sells you on the system.

Of course, Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter – or their originals anyway – are better, more influential games than Ridge Racer or Battle Arena Toshinden. Certainly their Saturn port’s presentation was off, but later re-releases tried to fix the problems. Eventually, Daytona USA would be supplanted by the classic Sega Rally Championship. But that nuance isn’t as attractive as a knee-jerk reaction declaring the Saturn doomed.

The idea that anyone could be full of nostalgia for Ridge Racer is odd. While sales were strong, contemporary reviews were mixed and it was rarely cited as a great game by the end of the generation, much less in 2006.  Why the mixed reaction, if it was so popular? It’s one of the more shallow major games made in modern times. How shallow?

Ridge Racer has just one track.

There’s four variations on the track – for different difficulty levels and time trials – but without any multiplayer, this game is short. This simplicity betrays its arcade roots, yet in an arcade there is the tension of failure. Failing costs money. Here, it can’t even make you lose face with friends. There are no cars to unlock, except by beating the Galaxian minigame on the loading screen. The only challenge is beating your times.

Yet Ridge Racer’s one track is beautiful, in its ragged, primitive way. Daytona USA and other racers had advertisements dotting the track and little else. Ridge Racer’s world is alive with detail. There’s a helicopter buzzing around the track, sometimes just above your car. There are waterfalls, and jumbo jets coming in to land. The track cycles between day and night; at night, the lights switch on. One building’s lights form a giant smiley face. Harder variations on the track open up a loop through a desert construction site. The graphics are still grainy, but what they portray is compelling.

Ridge Racer may not have had much substance to it, but the world warrants celebration for including these details. With the rise of 3D, games could make their worlds seem more real and alive, yet many games of the time coped with the limited space and technology available by making worlds that were sparse and sterile. Alternatively, they would place 3D characters on pre-rendered backgrounds. You can’t accuse Namco of making the same mistakes with Ridge Racer. Of course, when you don’t have to worry about adding unlockables or extra tracks, you have the time to lavish attention on the most impressive elements. The developers of 50 hour games couldn’t afford to put loving attention to detail into every room. If Ridge Racer was any more complex, or if it originated on the Playstation and not in arcades, I doubt it would look good to modern, or even contemporary, eyes.

Shoot all the aliens and you can use every car.

No one remembered Ridge Racer in 2006 because it wasn’t made to be remembered. To draw an analogy to arcades: Ridge Racer was the Playstation’s attract mode. In arcades, videos showed off gameplay to entice you to come over and plug in a few quarters. Once you’re playing, who cares about the video that got you over there? Ridge Racer, and games like it, are advertisements for their console. You aren’t meant to spend 100 hours playing Ridge Racer; you’re meant to see video of the game, buy it on launch day, have a few hours of fun with it, and consign it to gather dust on your shelf as more developed experiences come along. There are system launch titles that are great (Soul Calibur and Super Mario World spring to mind); but many more fall into the same “attract mode” category as Ridge Racer. And that’s exactly the category the developers want them to be in.

Ridge Racer would have three sequels on the Playstation – I’ll be playing 1996’s Ridge Racer Revolution and 1999’s R4, the series’ peak. After that, however, Ridge Racer became a series used near-exclusively to launch new systems. Ridge Racer V debuted with the PS2, Ridge Racer 6 with the XBox 360 and Ridge Racer 7 with the PS3. None of these games would have the same impact as Ridge Racer, which makes sense: they had less to prove.

3D games were not new in 1995, but 3D games done well were. Ridge Racer wasn’t designed to be remembered for years, and today its only of historical value, but its impact cannot be denied.

Sure, Ridge Racer only has one track. But it’s a good track.

notes

• Easter egg: start a race, turn around, and ram into the wall behind the starting line at full speed. The track will now be backwards. Keep reading 32 Bits for more pro tips and secrets from 20 year old games!

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#2: The Raiden Project

Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu; published by Sony

Released in Japan January 1995; launch title in the US and Europe

Best-seller in: Japan (Playstation the Best)

Should we mourn arcades? They evolved in Japan, but not here. They were often more interesting for the environment they provided than their games. Frustrating aspects of console gaming, like limited lives and continues, derived from an arcade machine’s need to kill the player for more money – arcades were a limiting factor to console games. Yet today, in a time of online gaming – where you can engage in impersonal communication with strangers across the world – it’s hard not to long for a time where gaming was a communal activity. Back in 1999, there was an arcade at the local malls. When I think of it, I hardly remember the games. I remember a friend’s birthday party, the arcade full of children and their harried parents. Or the arcade in a resort, nestled in a room below water slides. The games were secondary to the environment and the interaction. Today, the arcade of that birthday party is gone. They are a novelty in resorts and restaurants, not a business.

Though both are from arcades, Ridge Racer was gaming’s future. The Raiden Project was gaming’s past. During the early days of fifth generation consoles, many of the 3D games were awkward and ugly. The best games were the most aged, the most visibly outdated – those proven on other consoles or in genres developers were already familiar with. The best console games in 1995 were not found on the Playstation or the Saturn, but on the Super Nintendo, a system that produced all-time classics Yoshi’s Island, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound that year. To make a comparison – think of the last years of silent films, and the début of sound. Early sound films are theatrical and dull today, compared to silent masterpieces like Sunrise, Metropolis, City Lights and The Passion of Joan of Arc. The directors of the latter were using knowledge gained over decades of silent filmmaking, and were free from the pressure of reinventing their medium. 2D games, developed by those already skilled with their creation, would always outpace the first good 3D games, just like how the last games on a dying console will be better, and made with more skill, than the first games on its successor.

The Raiden Project is a pair of arcade ports from the early 90s, it’s in a dying genre, and yet I would recommend it over Ridge Racer.

The Raiden Project contains Raiden and Raiden II, both top-scrolling shooters. A genre popular on 2D systems, they would essentially die in the fifth generation. There are only two I’ll be playing on the Playstation: this game, and 1996’s Raystorm. Both were only popular in Japan.

But this genre was not truly dead. It just moved underground. As gaming became more mainstream, many developers would have seen the idea of dodging hundreds of enemy bullets as too challenging for the growing numbers of gamers, but a niche audience rose to the challenge of these games. Freed from the expectations and wishes of the general public, scrolling shooters would evolve to be even more difficult. The infamous “bullet hell” genre began here.

The Raiden Project is arcade-perfect in the last generation where gamers cared if a game was arcade perfect. Soon enough, arcades would be dead in North America. Maybe they already were in 1995, as the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter kick faded. It’s possibly too arcade perfect: if you accept the risk, you can turn your TV on its side and play the game in the same vertical format of the arcade machine. I’m sure there were many TV sets broken in the pursuit of the perfect experience – the kind of gamer dedicated enough to flip over their TV to play Raiden properly would be running an accurate MAME cabinet today.

The Raiden Project includes impressive customization – of difficulty, lives, and continues. It’s eminently accessible.

I praised Ridge Racer for creating a world in three dimensions, but The Raiden Project proves you can include little details in 2D, too. Down on the ground, beneath the many bullets and ships you dodge, you can see farmers and their animals dart about. You may not have time to notice such details with your concentration on the frenzied combat, yet they are there.

I said I’ll only play two games in this genre, but that’s not true. I apologize for taking over this review of The Raiden Project to introduce its entire genre, but I felt it was a necessary introduction. I’ll be playing many more shooters…on the Saturn, nearly all of them exclusive to Japan. There the genre flourished; of course, the Saturn had little mass-market appeal already, so a tiny genre like shooters fit in. The Playstation had consigned this type of game to its past, despite outliers like The Raiden Project; but in cozier places around gaming, it would continue to grow.

notes

• Anyone nostalgic for the days of arcades should check out Arcade Nation.

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Hear It Now! Play It Later!

Here is an interesting curiosity.

The late 90s were the era of the demo. Cheap CDs meant everyone with a mailbox was inundated with free trials and previews. Most infamously, there were the endless AOL discs. PC games such as Doom pioneered the shareware format, where you bought the first episode and paid for the rest if you liked it. The Playstation had its share of demos, too.

Today, demos are rare. They just aren’t cost-effective. But in 1995, internet videos would take a whole night to download. The only way to make sure people knew of your game was to include it on some demo disc – often one included in a magazine, the main source of gaming news in those nascent days of the internet.

Hear It Now, Play It Later! is the developer tech demo for the Playstation. It was also a preorder bonus, and a type of viral ad. Once you preordered the Playstation, you’d be given this CD. You could play music from “top Sony artists”, with odd voice clips from Playstation games inserted throughout. And once you got your Playstation, you could put it in and see…

Colorful balls bouncing around the screen. You can add more, testing how many objects could be displayed on-screen at once:

A cube that comes closer – showing it’s made of many smaller objects:

Frogs – 2D sprites – bouncing around. They cast shadows:

A test of lighting on simple geometric shapes, with changing textures:

This one is odd. A test of FMV video, that’s tested with scenes of cities and a woman applying makeup. I’m almost afraid that seven days after viewing this video, I’ll die.

Even odder: that same FMV, placed over a bouncing orb. I get what this test was showing – you could stretch video over 3D objects. But why show it off with a giant orb-face?

A manta glides through the sea:

And the disc’s peak – a t-rex.

You can rotate it and the camera; you can make it roar. The go-to reference for quality 3D graphics in 1995 would be Jurassic Park. This demo says, “the Playstation can equal that standard”

Of course, the Playstation couldn’t match up to Jurassic Park’s quality. But it still brought games into a new dimension. 3D was familiar from the Jaguar and 3DO – but they flopped. The Playstation and Saturn pushed 3D gaming to the forefront, a transition as important as the one from black and white film to color. As early as Ridge Racer, we can see the value of a 3D world. Its life and realism, beyond what a 2D game could do. Yet the Raiden Project shows old experiences were often more vital, a dichotomy we will see play out more in the weeks to come.

notes

• Information on this demo’s viral advertising aspects, and its existence, comes from Jason Dvorak’s invaluable site Game Rave.
• The promotional video linked is unique as it contains a glimpse of Madden NFL ’96 – the only Madden game to be cancelled.

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Next Time: Two franchises that flamed out quickly – ESPN Extreme Games and Battle Arena Toshinden. One turns skateboarding into Road Rash. The other tries to take fighting games in a new direction, but fails.

(Sorry for the delay – I realized after scheduling this post for Sunday that no one would read a post made during the Super Bowl. The next post, and subsequent posts, will go up on Sundays.)