Best launch titles ever: Ridge Racer on PlayStation - article

The first encounter with some games from the past, it is impossible to remove it from memory. For us (and we're safe for many others too), one of those is Ridge Racer. Our first contact with the Namco racing title dates back to the summer of 1994 in the arcade, in a week we spent inserting countless coins into a car that looked like it came straight from a glittering future.

Look up YouTube. Then, six months later, we saw the same phenomenal racing game running in a friend's living room on a PlayStation imported from Japan at a very high price. It was like being in that arcade without even moving from home and it was the moment that started a long tradition, the launch of the new PlayStation hardware was always coupled with a new Namco racing title like Ridge Racer V, Ridge Racers and Ridge Racer 7. That tradition, unfortunately, was broken by the arrival of PlayStation 4 which marked the beginning of a period of rest for the series which, to date, has not yet returned to our screens. We can't put into words how much we miss those fictional sports cars with sci-fi design, those lightning-fast drifting, those techno soundtracks based on synthesizers.

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The arcade racer genre is still alive and well but what happened to stylish and brilliant games like Ridge Racer? We really miss it. Ridge Racer represented a vision of the future at the dawn of PlayStation history and, after all, that's a little bit what's missing from the PS5 and Xbox Series X launch line-ups: not just a great launch title but a real one. own gear shift!