According to Play staff writer Tim Empey, there are literally “bucket loads” of racing games available for the PSP. We tried to scientifically determine exactly what constitutes a ‘bucket load’ by counting the number of PSP titles reviewed by our sister magazine, GoPlay, and the number of those that are racing games. It turns out that GoPlay has reviewed a total of 119 PSP games, of which 20 of these were based on racing of some sort. Statistically this means that 16.8 per cent of PSP games involve driving. We checked back with Tim and apparently this is enough to constitute a ‘bucket load’, so now you know.

Admittedly our calculations wouldn’t stand up to any level of scrutiny, but whichever way you cut it, you have to admit that there are quite a few racing games on the PSP. It follows that this has to be taken into account whenever you review a new PSP racer and, as there are already a number of classics available, each one has to offer something a little different than the last to separate it from the pack. Burnout’s got the whole crashing thing covered; Outrun 2006 is the place to go for arcade thrills; WipEout owns the future; and the original Ridge Racer is the king of drifters. The competition is very strong, meaning that Namco has its work cut out if it wants to improve upon its own seminal game, let alone best any of the others.

On paper it would seem as though Ridge Racer 2 does everything that you could possibly ask of it, adding a number of new features and keeping the gameplay that made the first game so good. For starters, there are now nine more courses than appeared in the original game (see ‘Courses For Horses (Cars Actually)’ for a full list of all the tracks), with every circuit from every Ridge Racer appearing. On top of that there are now more tours, different cars and the graphics have been improved slightly.

Like the first Ridge Racer, the world tours are the heart of the game and you’ll spend most of your time competing in these. Each tour gets progressively harder and at certain points you’ll move onto a higher class of machine, providing a well-balanced learning curve to help you improve your skills the further you get. If you played Ridge Racer then this will be old-hat to you, although there are some new modes outside of the world tours to try out. Like we said, it looks good on paper, but in practice it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth. From the very first tour you start, the signs aren’t great and you’re immediately hit with a sense of déjà vu as you tackle exactly the same course you were faced with at the beginning of the last game (even the music is the same). In fact, we were so sure that we were playing Ridge Racer rather than its sequel, we had to take the UMD out of the PSP to check. We weren’t, of course, but the two games are strikingly similar, from the identical title screen to the return of the annoying guy from the first game, screaming the same irritating things at you during races.

That’s not to say that Ridge Racer 2 is a bad game though – far from it – it just doesn’t offer enough new content to make it feel like anything other than a slap in the face with a sock full of rotten oranges. It still has everything that made the first Ridge Racer such a classic, with some of the best graphics on the system and superb racing, but it should have had so much more to give. Instead it looks like Namco has played it very safe with Ridge Racer 2, sticking rigidly to the road map laid out by the first game at the expense of new ideas. If you spent a lot of time playing Ridge Racer then you’ll quickly get the ‘been there, done that’ feeling pretty quickly.

On Play we always struggle with the importance of originality in games, but Ridge Racer 2 doesn’t suffer because it’s unoriginal, but because it feels like nothing more than a cynical cash-in. The new stuff is nice and makes Ridge Racer 2 the ultimate PSP Ridge Racer experience, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been made available as downloadable extras for the first game. To make matters worse, Ridge Racer was recently re-released as a Platinum title for just £19.99, making the £34.99 asking price for this all the more extortionate. If you didn’t play Ridge Racer to death (and if you own a PSP, what are the chances of that?) then discount everything we just said and buy it, but everyone else should wait until it comes down in price before bothering.

Jude Salmon