Ridge Racer is an all-timer. Namco’s arcade racer was the culmination of their years of experimenting with pseudo-3D and actual 3D racing games, from Pole Position to Winning Run, that basically invented its own kind of physics for drift-heavy racing through one track that was actually two, if you were willing to challenge yourself on its tougher version.
That’s all you needed for an arcade racer back in the day, really: one exceptionally difficult track to master, where the goal wasn’t so much finishing in first as it was completing your laps in a time no one else was going to be able to touch. The PlayStation port was evidence of this, as well: Sega, with Daytona USA and their own long history of successful arcade racers, was seen as the inherent favorite for that kind of experience on their home console, given Sony’s newness. But Namco, Sega’s long-time rival, came along armed with an exceptional port of Ridge Racer that not only translated a killer arcade experience to the living room, but added in selectable cars, tracks you drove in reverse, unlockables, and more, all to Sony’s benefit. And things just kind of got worse from there for Sega.
That was a port of the arcade game, however, one designed for the PlayStation’s controller. As great as it was, it had to be downgraded a bit from Namco’s arcade release: the resolution was lower and it ran at 30 frames per second, neither of which hurt the game by any means, but the actual arcade game had never been released anywhere besides, well, the arcade, and that version ran fast and smooth. Of course, unless you stumbled upon it in an arcade at some point, then you wouldn’t be aware of the difference between the two.
That’s changed in the present, thanks to Hamster’s Arcade Archives range. This is an at-home version of the arcade game, as the releases in this series always are, with the only true modification made to it outside of adding in optional quality of life settings being that you can use a controller to play. The original Ridge Racer, you see, controlled with a steering wheel and pedals: converting that and getting the feel just right is difficult, and you know this is true because reactions to Ridge Racer’s Arcade Archives release are sometimes mixed, with complaints about the controls being a little too touchy or twitchy. Like with any other Ridge Racer game, it’s a feel thing: it takes practice to get it just right, even if you consider yourself a veteran of racing games or Ridge Racer titles in general.
There are four modes here to choose from. Original lets you play with whatever kind of settings you’d like and gives you the ability to save or load your progress, while also granting you access to either the Japanese or English versions of Ridge Racer, as well as the regional DX editions which utilized a clutch for shifting gears, controlled here by default by the right analog stick. There’s a Hi Score mode, which uses predetermined settings and doesn’t allow for saving your game—or even pausing it—since the idea is that this one is for leaderboard sickos. Practice the game all you want with save scumming and modified settings, but if you want the score to count for something? Hi Score mode is right there. There is also a Caravan mode, which converts distance driven into points over a five-minute span. And there’s Time Attack mode, which allows you to compete to see who can clear Ridge Racer the fastest. Basically, you can still fail and register a score here, so long as you make it to at least one checkpoint.
Time Attack mode is also different from the Time Trial mode, which is a specific one from Ridge Racer itself, where it was known as “T.T.” T.T. is included within the Hi Score and Caravan modes as an option, along with Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced difficulties: these determine the length of the track you can race on as well as your car’s top speed. There’s more to Advanced than just faster opponents and more difficult handling, since the track itself is significantly altered and requires even more mastering of the game’s drift mechanics.
The one downside is that Nintendo has left analog triggers behind, so on the Switch and Switch 2 (the Switches?), you can’t completely mimic feathering the gas pedal in order to pull off perfect drifts, as you could in the arcade edition of the game. You can learn the proper touch all the same, however, through some practice—I know this first hand since my spot in the online leaderboards keeps dropping as more and more people play more and more Ridge Racer and best my times. Just like how the analog stick isn’t a perfect replacement for the steering wheel, the Nintendo’s triggers aren’t perfect brake or gas pedals, but you can get yourself close enough to the real thing with time, at least.
At $16.99, this is more than twice as expensive as Arcade Archives releases tend to be, but there are two reasons for that: this is an Arcade Archives 2 game, the first of its kind. Unlike Arcade Archives games, which release on the Switch and PlayStation 4, Arcade Archives 2 is meant for PlayStation 5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X. (The PS5 and Xbox Series systems do have analog triggers, for those who crave that control option in Ridge Racer.) There is a difference between the Arcade Archives edition of Ridge Racer and its Arcade Archives 2 cousin: the latter includes the Time Attack mode, quick start, additional save slots, a rewind feature, and a variable refresh rate, whereas the standard Arcade Archives one has the same kinds of options that the other hundreds of games in the series have to this point.
There are two things happening here, both tied together and a bit separately. What’s clear, between Ridge Racer and the recent release of another Namco title, NebulasRay, is that Hamster is starting to expand beyond the 8-bit and 16-bit eras that it’s stayed almost exclusively in—the ACA Neo Geo series contains most of the exceptions to this rule, since that was a 32-bit system. However, despite being 32-bit the Neo Geo was focused on sprites and pixels, not rendering polygons—when you see what appear to be polygons in Neo Geo games, they’re pre-rendered sprites, a trick that later, more advanced models of the 16-bit PC Engine CD could also deploy as needed like in Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire, or in the same way that the SNES faked it with Donkey Kong Country and Treasure Hunter G.
There are a wealth of non-Neo Geo 32-bit arcade games out there waiting to be released under Hamster’s banner, and they finally seem ready to move in that direction. They’re going to be more expensive than the standard, $7.99 releases—that’s the second reason Ridge Racer costs $17 in its ACA2 form—but if the idea is that they take more work to develop for the series than, say, another release of Pac-Man does, then that makes some measure of sense even if it’s annoying for those of us very, very trained to have $8 plus tax ready for any given Thursday. And let’s be real: if The Outfoxies releases through Arcade Archives 2, you and I both know that we don’t want Hamster to know what we’d pay for it if forced to.
That might be a reality, too: Namco’s arcade fighter that very likely led to Super Smash Bros. ran on their NB-2 hardware, a 32-bit board that also housed Mach Breakers, the sequel to the delightful Numan Athletics that Arcade Archives already rescued from the past. If Arcade Archives is going to start busting out 32-bit arcade titles as a semi-regular occurrence, then it’s time to start making a wishlist. Another one, I mean. Get Konami on the phone, and put Solar Assault on our Switch 2s, thank you.
The other thing that the release of Ridge Racer signifies is that Hamster has decided to delve into the world of racing games. Do you know how many racing games were on Arcade Archives before Ridge Racer? It’s a real short list: of the 366 arcade games released as of this Thursday, 10 are racing games. Two of those are Pole Position and Pole Position II, i.e., the starting point for Formula 1 chase-cam racers. One is Excitebike, which is a racing game, yes, but not in the way we mean when we talk about Ridge Racer. Namco’s gem stands on its own on this list, and is not about to be confused with Taito’s Highway Race, an arcade game where the goal is to avoid obstacles while going very fast so you can make a really big jump.
With the move to both 32-bit and polygons from Hamster, will we see Winning Run at some point? Hard Drivin’? The version of Cruis’n USA that’s actually fun to play? San Francisco Rush? You get the idea: a new world is opening up, one where we get to start reviving arcade racing games that were actually released in the arcades, and without having to hope that they run in MAME or can be configured to work on a keyboard or what have you.
It’s an exciting time if you’re a particular kind of nerd, and since Hamster keeps on releasing these games each week without pause, that’s a line directed at quite a few of you. It’s too much to hope that Sega ever gets involved in any of this, sure, so that we start to see more than the usual suspects from their arcade division released in the present, but hey. There are a whole lot of other companies out there that made 32-bit, polygonal arcade games in the ‘90s, and many people are going to be introduced to them in this console era through Arcade Archives’ new initiative, in the same way those same people got a whole lot more Nichibutsu in their lives than they’d ever imagined they would while Hamster focused on 8- and 16-bit titles.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.
