First off, I have a Goldeneye Wii review complete, but my stupid laptop died and it is now gone. I’ll probably get around to doing a multiplayer one but I doubt I’ll have the courage to make another one again.
Alright, I now have 3 games on my 3DS. I’ll get Ocarnia of Time when I can be bothered, as I never had a N64 and never got around to playing it. I subscribe to the Official Nintendo Magazine Australia, and by their review of Ridge Racer, I decided I wanted a 3D racing game, so I bought it. I’ve never played previous Ridge Racer games, so if this is the way the whole series is, take it as my criticism of the series instead. From first glance, the game is good. The graphics are a good example of what the 3DS can do, the 3D effect is only mildly annoying (because when I play racing games I tilt the handheld a little bit to the direction I’m heading in, which causes you to get a double image). The game’s music, again is great. There’s a wide range of tracks you can choose from, and while techno is not quite my forte, I still like it. This seems to be repeating itself. The racing tracks, again are good. Besides being windy and too narrow, the tracks are wide (the irony was NOT intended) and varied. You’ll have beautiful cliff coastlines, tropical beaches, massive cities, snowy mountains and so on.
Right about now you’ll be reading the title and wondering what the hell I’m on.
Here’s the negative part. You’ll start racing, and then there’s this commentary on. A woman saying things like “Whoa” (when you hit something), “This is getting intense” (when you hit a car) and “You’re in xth place, (x-1)th place is just around the corner” (when you’re on your final lap). The commentary changes and there are many more events the woman wants to comment on. However, when she say’s it’s getting intense and you’ve only just nipped the person next to you, or when she’s reminding you what place you’re in when it’s clearly on the HUD and your opponent is right beside you, and telling you you’ve used nitrous when you clearly are aware of it because you’ve fucking just hit the button yourself it’s really REALLY ANNOYING. Here you are, rocking out to the awesome soundtrack and there’s some stupid lady adding her input constantly. You can’t turn it off, either. While it’s good to know that you’re on the final corner because the zoomed-in map on the touch screen doesn’t show the finish line for some stupid reason, or reminding you that your nitrous tanks are full. And yeah, the complements on my driving are nice for about 10 minutes, and then that’s about it. So I have to resort to muting the game and missing the sweet music.
It gets worse. It’s pretty obvious from first playing the game that the turning circle of the cars is horrible, so you have to drift. That’s good, and what the developers intended to do. When you drift, it builds up your nitrous bar, which is customisable (I.E. auto filling up, available to use as soon as you getting it and to the amount you specify instead of filling up tanks and then using up that tank). Again, nothing wrong with that. The game lets you use a a button that automatically puts your car into drift for newbies (and me) or you can do it manually. Again, that’s good. The game is split up into four categories of cars, which increase in power as you advance through the categories. Again! Good, it lets you get a feel for the game before throwing you into some crazy muscle car. The cars can have custom paint jobs and have different advantages and disadvantages (which is hard to find out due to know stat bar) and different top speeds and drift type.
The review seems to be going positive. What a pity, it’s not going to be any more.
You’ll start off seeing only one car on the track. The car in 1st place starts a half to a third around the track in front of you. You’ll get in the car in front of your’s streamline, catch up to it, and then duke it out until the AI decides to give up, and falls back. You don’t go faster than them, you can’t intelligently manover around them, you just duke it out, and then the AI drops back. Move up to the next car. Stay in the streamline. Duke it out. Repeat.
You’ll be doing this incredibly boring repetition until category 2 (I wouldn’t know beyond there, I rage quit at this stage). It’s fun for about an hour, but with the gran prix races only introducing a casual reverse track or a new track every 2 or three gran prixes it gets boring. Fast. Category 3 is the same, only slightly faster. And then sometimes you’ll get to a point where you’re duking it out with another car, and all of a sudden your car is flung backwards, and you drop about 4 places. That glitch has happened SO many times it’s not funny, forcing you to repeat the sometimes 4-5 minutes long tracks and the streamline, fight streamline, fight repeating dance for another 5 minutes.
It makes me rage so hard. Such a good game besides the two previous negatives, which completely ruin it. It’s not a game you can play for 4 hours straight and just can’t put down, instead you’ll feel brave and tackle it for 10 minutes at a time until you inevitably rage quit. I’ve heard category 1 is different and way better, but sorry, I’m not sitting through hours of repetitive gameplay and tracks, annoying glitches and commentary until I get to the “interesting” part. It’s not interesting gaming, and you rage quit not over being incredibly hard but instead incredibly hard AND annoying AND repetitive AND repetitive AND repetitive AND repetitive.
My Rating
Music: 9
Gameplay: 2
Creativity: 3
Graphics: 8
Other: 1
Total: 23/50
Wait, What? 