Ridge Racer DS Review

The Graphics

I found the Graphics in this Ridge Racer installment to be horrible. Pre-PS1 to be exact. I’ve seen some pretty good-looking games on the DS and this one is by far the worst. Most of the tracks looks like a bunch of blocky colored things. Although the cars are a little crisper, they still are drawn with tell-tale jagged lines. The backgrounds in the horizon looked okay, it’s no wonder they didn’t use the same quality on the tracks and foreground.

One positive about the graphics was how smoothly it ran. A few places the game slowed down, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The Control

Here’s another area Ridge Racer DS fell short. Controlling the cars was a chore. You have two options. One is to use the digital pad and buttons, which wasn’t too bad. The other way was to use the touch screen. On this screen was a steering wheel and you could use the stylus to move the steering wheel. Kind of awkward if you ask me. I didn’t have time to look down to see if the stylus was on the steering wheel or if I was turning at all.

Drifting is a staple of Ridge Racer and in all the other games you have control on how you enter the drift and how you come out of the drift. Not so in the DS version. When you enter a drift the computer takes over for you and rides a ‘line’ around the turn until you straighten out. So you better make sure you going in strong and be ready to take over when coming out, otherwise you’ll miss a few precious seconds and probably lose the race.

The Gameplay

This hasn’t changed. Ridge Racer still has you racing around various tracks to unlock more tracks and cars. The only problem is that there are plenty of races, but not a lot of tracks or variations of the track, which Ridge Racer is known for (see Ridge Racer for PSP Review).

Thompson’s Two Cents

I got bored with Ridge Racer DS after about an hour of play. I fought hard to finish a lot of the events, but right now, the game sits on my shelf of very few DS games. I’m still a fan of the Ridge Racer universe, but not of this game.