Last week when I was off on holiday, I picked up a couple of PSP games – Ridge Racer and WRC – when I saw them at a reduced price. I decided a couple of new things to play while I was away would be a good idea, and although I wasn’t sure how good either game would be, I thought for the asking price it was worth a gamble.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I normally prefer my driving games to be more simulation than arcade, so picking up Ridge Racer was a bit of an unusual move for me to make. However, it was Ridge Racer I put into the PSP first, thinking it would be the game I liked least. My theory for this is that if I put in the best game first, I’m unlikely to get to the other one for playing the first too much.

So Ridge Racer loads up and looks pretty slick, the menu system is nicely designed and easy to use and it doesn’t take long to get to play the first race. And boy does this look pretty. In fact I play Ridge Racer for an hour or so, which is longer than I intended to, but it did allow me to get an idea of the game physics and the speed of the game.

Eventually I managed to stop playing Ridge Racer and put in the WRC (World Rally Championship) game. This is the game I thought I was going to like best, and initial impressions of the game were that it was pretty bad. Having come straight from Ridge Racer, the car handling seemed very twitchy and uncontrollable, and the presentation was more arcade than simulation, something I wasn’t expecting in a Rally game. I quickly abandoned WRC and went back to playing Ridge Racer.

I will talk more about the WRC game in another post, but to reiterate, initial impressions were not what I hoped for.

Back to Ridge Racer then, and a few more hours of play saw the basic championship completed and the pro-tour started. With numerous layouts to each track, and the ability to play each circuit in reverse means you don’t get bored with the game that quickly, although after playing for an hour or so it can become a little tiresome.

The in-game music is pretty good as well, fitting in nicely with the general arcade feel of the game.

Downsides to Ridge Racer – well, there aren’t that many, but my main gripe is with the physics of the car. While the principle of drifting the car around the ciruit is great, I noticed on a few occasions that getting it wrong and turning away from the corner didn’t result in a horrific crash but instead the car getting pulled around the corner correctly, almost like a reverse drift.

Although this problem didn’t cause any issues as such, it did slightly spoil the game for me.

Over all though, Ridge Racer is a good solid little racer addition to my PSP game collection, and a game I will continue to play once completed (if I ever get that far), similar in a lot of ways to WipeOut Pure.