There’s part of me that still can’t quite believe I’m playing Rave Racer on a home console. Namco’s 1995 sequel to Ridge Racer never made it out of the arcades back in the day, despite promises that it would be ported to PC as part of NEC’s push for its PowerVR graphics processor.
For years, the game’s legacy has been having its circuits reproduced in later Ridge Racer games, but Rave Racer has finally been released from its arcade prison – and while its coin-op roots are both a plus and a minus, what we have here is perhaps the purist example of what makes this franchise so special.
Rave Racer consists of four circuits, two of which are taken from the original Ridge Racer (technically, they’re variations on the same track, so in reality, there are, in fact, three courses on offer here). The City and Mountain courses would resurface in the PSP entries Ridge Racer and Ridge Racer 2 as ‘Midtown Expressway’ and ‘Greenpeak Highlands’, while the City circuit would form the basis of Ridge Racer 6’s Rave City.
You can choose to either race against 11 other cars or take part in Time Trial events, and it’s even possible to race all of the circuits in reverse, thanks to a combination of button presses before selecting your track (right, right, then press the accelerator and brake simultaneously).
Manual and Automatic transmission options are available, and this release lets you compete against three other friends in split-screen mode that replicates the multi-cabinet link-up mode originally seen in arcades. There’s also a two-player split-screen mode, too.
These features — alongside the traditional Time Attack, Caravan, and Hi Score modes the Arcade Archives series is famous for — do much to extend the longevity of Rave Racer, which, like Arcade Archives Ridge Racer before it, can quickly become stale if you’re not totally committed to perfecting your racing lines and tirelessly improving your track times. After all, this is a game that was designed for arcade and not home play.
Despite the lack of progression and low number of circuits on offer, Rave Racer plays like an absolute dream. The handling model in this game is subtly different from that seen in Ridge Racer (and pretty much every other game in the lineage, for that matter); cars aggressively shift as they make sharp turns, and the camera itself tilts whenever you drift around a tight corner. Furthermore, there’s an on-screen splitstream gauge that shows when you’re benefiting from ‘drafting’ behind rival cars.
The drifting itself feels like it offers more bandwidth for player skill to emerge; it takes a little getting used to initially (especially for those of us weaned on the PS1 port of Ridge Racer, which was designed with digital and not analogue steering in mind), but after a few hours of play you fall into an almost subconcious ‘flow state’ and the whole experience becomes practically otherworldly.
Rave Racer isn’t the perfect racing game, by any means; there’s not a lot of content and no career mode, but the on-track action is as pure and exhilarating as any you’ll encounter in the arcade racing sub-genre. And, in case you were wondering, yes, the game still has the bug which has allowed players to totally smash the game’s course records.
