Features// Sony's PS3 Driving Development
I want to integrate all the players around the world into one world
When you play it, Formula One Championship impresses. Particularly in terms of the feel you get when you start turning off the driver aids. You can also swap the green line showing the route to take through each corner, which also tells you when to brake, for something call BTA markers, which are coloured virtual traffic cones telling you when to brake, turn and accelerate – which are what you will find on any circuit if you do a driving day, and which are a useful means of teaching you how to get round a circuit properly.
The dawn lighting effect on the test tracks is great eye-candy, but Ankers is right when he says that the wet weather effect forces you to alter your driving style – when you drive behind a car, you can hardly see anything. And it looks amazing. The only downside of the game is that reinforces the impression that the sixaxis controller was an afterthought. F1CE supports the sixaxis, and in the interests of comprehensiveness, I gave it a go. It instantly rendered the game utterly unplayable, so I turned it off again.
Ridge Racer 7
Much to everyone’s surprise, a couple of Namco’s Ridge Racer 7 team from Japan put in an appearance at Sony Liverpool, with associate director Hideo Teramoto taking it upon himself to extol RR7’s virtues. Sadly, it was largely a case of “lost in translation” as Teramoto’s talk was obscured by an indistinct translator then, one-on-one, annoyingly unspecific answers were the norm.
I did learn some things about RR7, though. Teramoto picked out three key aspects of the game: “The online side, the customisation and the fact that it runs in 1080p at 60fps”. Teramoto started by showing the impressive car customisation which, like Midnight Club, takes in all body elements plus mechanicals and, he claimed, brings about “370,000 possibilities from 40 different types of car. The nitrous is a customisable performance part – you can change its attributes – and through changing the aero, you can change the drift characteristics.”
He gave a brief demo of an online race, and revealed that the multiplayer will have Team Battle and Pairs Battle modes – the latter letting you and a mate race in tandem against other pairs of players. A complex system of points gets you a ranking – the game has both Fame Points and Ridge Racer Points (with the former dictating your online status).
You can bookmark favoured online competitors, and mail them when you fancy a race. And the game has a bizarre “Hero Interview”, which lets you type in a few words when you win a race. Teramoto said: “I want to integrate all the players around the world into one Ridge Racer world – I wanted to create a new community online”. Up to 14 players can play online.
Elsewhere, Ridge Racer 7 is exactly what you would expect from Ridge Racer – it’s lift-off-oversteer-tastic – except with next-gen graphics, exemplified with a slightly psychedelic motion-blur effect when you hit the nitrous. I noticed that it was possible to generate different-coloured nitrous flames by pressing either the left or the right trigger, or both at the same time.
Teramoto was annoyingly vague, just saying that you can “upgrade the nitrous so it has different characteristics” – presumably the amount of time it takes to recharge, the amount of time your boost lasts and so on. The game also has slipstreaming. Disappointingly, a good slipstream won’t charge your nitrous, but it will let you overtake the car in front.
Ridge Racer 7 did look like the best ever version of the hoary old arcade fave, and should prove particularly popular online in Japan – Teramoto said that 20,000 Japanese have played it online already. But I suspect that it won’t really set Europe alight next March.
The dawn lighting effect on the test tracks is great eye-candy, but Ankers is right when he says that the wet weather effect forces you to alter your driving style – when you drive behind a car, you can hardly see anything. And it looks amazing. The only downside of the game is that reinforces the impression that the sixaxis controller was an afterthought. F1CE supports the sixaxis, and in the interests of comprehensiveness, I gave it a go. It instantly rendered the game utterly unplayable, so I turned it off again.
Ridge Racer 7
He gave a brief demo of an online race, and revealed that the multiplayer will have Team Battle and Pairs Battle modes – the latter letting you and a mate race in tandem against other pairs of players. A complex system of points gets you a ranking – the game has both Fame Points and Ridge Racer Points (with the former dictating your online status).
You can bookmark favoured online competitors, and mail them when you fancy a race. And the game has a bizarre “Hero Interview”, which lets you type in a few words when you win a race. Teramoto said: “I want to integrate all the players around the world into one Ridge Racer world – I wanted to create a new community online”. Up to 14 players can play online.
Elsewhere, Ridge Racer 7 is exactly what you would expect from Ridge Racer – it’s lift-off-oversteer-tastic – except with next-gen graphics, exemplified with a slightly psychedelic motion-blur effect when you hit the nitrous. I noticed that it was possible to generate different-coloured nitrous flames by pressing either the left or the right trigger, or both at the same time.
