I'm Done Playing: Ridge Racer 64
In which I triumphantly return to writing about video games
It’s been a while, video games. I’m writing this because I just finished Nixonland, which will probably be the next installation in the “I Read That” series. But because Nixonland is long and also very good, I wanted to take my time writing something about it. I do not have time this week. I’m going to three baseball games this weekend, and since the average run time of an MLB game is approximately twelve hours, I’ll probably be too busy watching the Twins blow leads to write anything substantial.
Luckily, this week I’ve been playing a video game: Ridge Racer 64. It’s a classic arcade-style racer for the Nintendo 64, and I’ve been zipping through it over the past week. I don’t have much to say about it, so this review is going to be a lot of me desperately trying to fill space until I get at least a page written. Just one page.
The fact of the matter is, two pages is a lot to write about a video game. I used to read Electronic Gaming Monthly back in the day, and they frequently had reviews that were like, 350 words. That’s probably the right approach. There’s just not that much to say about a video game without descending into onanistic navel gazing. So, with that in mind, here’s my 350 word review of Ridge Racer:
Ridge Racer 64 is a throwback to simpler times. Pick a car, pick a track, and get racing. There’s nine tracks to choose from, and, in a twist that either seems fun or cheap, they’re based on three different meta-locations. There’s an easy, medium, and hard version of each location, with different routes open depending on the difficulty level. This makes for a fun experience, as each track feels familiar and fresh at the same time. It also allows you to reuse your track knowledge as you progress through the game. The game pads out its run time by making you re-race those tracks to unlock new cars in its “car attack” mode. Still, despite the heavy recycling, the tracks and environments are detailed and interesting enough that they don’t get old.
The game’s pretty easy. If you’ve got significant experience with racing games, you’ll rocket through the first nine stages without issue. This is a breezy arcade racer…until it’s not. Get to the final tracks, and you’ll face punishingly rubber-banded AI that always manages to stay ahead of you, no matter how flawlessly you execute your turns. I beat all but the last few tracks, and boy howdy, I will not be going back. The last “car attack” is against an insanely fast car. After being utterly destroyed a few times, I checked the internet to see if there was something I was missing. There was not. You have to race six laps of a track without making a single mistake to unlock this car. One website casually mentioned that he had been playing for fifteen hours trying to beat this car. I don’t think the rest of the game took me fifteen hours to beat.
Ridge Racer 64 is a fun diversion. It’s well-executed classic racing action, and it’s worth a play.
So, there you go. That’s sort of padded, and it’s less than three hundred words. Anything else I added would be pure fluff. So where do I go from here?
The old go-to of a middling wit trying to say something interesting is to analyze the game from a feminist lens. How does Ridge Racer 64 fare? By and large, it is a game completely devoid of gender politics. Anti-woke gamers can rejoice, there is no woke nonsense in this game. It doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test. In fact, it has barely any dialogue at all, only an enthusiastic announcer saying things like “All right! This is gonna be a great race!” and “It’s the final lap! Make it your best!” It does, inexplicably, have a woman in an evening dress on the cover and title screen of the game, but she’s only a little bit sexualized. I take this as a win.
There is a strange connection between cars and sex. My grandpa used to get classic car magazines, and there’d invariably be a scantily clad model posing on the cover, along with whatever car was featured that week. Crusin’ USA had those pixelated bikini girls, and men can sometimes talk about high end cars like they’re talking about a beautiful woman (“Look at those curves”). I don’t understand this.
Maybe it’s something about the male mind: the notion that everything, at its core, connects to sex. Things like success or money can rather transparently tie into sex, but women are indifferent or even repelled by things like cars. The male mind must make some tenuous connection to hot women if it is going to be fully invested in something, and so you get bikini clad models on the cover of car magazines, ring girls in boxing, and buxom women in anime. Sports are physical dominance displays, like two elk locking horns over a mate. Cigars have no obvious connection, but perhaps the psychologists of the 1900s were right, and the phallic nature of the object provides a sexual outlet for men of a certain persuasion. Men truly only do want one thing.
Or maybe that’s all nonsense. It could be that cars, with their promise of speed and recklessness, tickle the thrill-seeking sector of the brain. There’s a rush that comes with driving too fast, and even the suggestion of that pleasure by an image of the sports car stimulates testosterone and puts the brain into an aggressive state, ready to charge headlong into whatever thrills that are provided. In this formulation, the car and hot woman relationship is the same as a cigarette after a gunfight. It’s all a big thrill–may as well heighten the feeling.
Or maybe it’s just as simple as this: men like to look at attractive women. The evidence against this theory is that the woman on the cover of Ridge Racer 64 isn’t very attractive. She’s a weird CG creation that just kind of stares blankly at the camera, closer to a Real Doll than a human woman.
Anyways. Ridge Racer 64 is pretty fun. If you have a Nintendo Switch online membership, it’s worth playing. Especially since Diddy Kong Racing isn’t on there yet.