Ridge Racer 7 Updated Hands-On: Going Online

The upcoming Ridge Racer 7 ushers the high-speed, drift-intensive racing series into the PlayStation 3 era with fast action, a rock-solid frame rate, and a 1080p presentation that really looks slick. Longtime fans of the series will be pleased to note that the responsive controls and nonstop action of the previous entries in the franchise is here intact, as we discovered after playing the game during our recent visit to the Namco offices in Santa Clara, California.

The first item on our agenda was getting in a few single-player races on tracks we hadn't yet played, as well as trying out a few different cars. Cars aren't rated just by their horsepower in Ridge Racer 7, but also by their drift tendency. There are three categories: mild, normal, and dynamic. As you might expect, mild-drift cars are those that are most stuck to the road; normal cars tend to offer a balance between tight turn-making ability and drifting; and dynamic-drift rides are best left to Ridge Racer vets for whom drifting is second nature. We made the unfortunate mistake of trying a dynamic-drift car first and found ourselves stupidly swinging the back ends of our cars to and fro down long straights as we tried to regain control.

During the next race, we tried the normal-class car and found a nice medium between nitrous-awarding drifts and, you know, actually being able to keep the car under control. That said, watching experts play with dynamic-drift cars--as we got to do when playing against Namco QA staff during an online multiplayer race--is an impressive sight. Not only were the Namco folks deadly accurate with their drifts around tight turns, they even were able to pull off insane-looking donuts while barreling down a straight in order to keep their cars' nitrous gauges consistently building. We'll return to the game's multiplayer in a bit; for now, let's finish up with the new single-player stuff we saw.

The Ridge State Grand Prix is the centerpiece of Ridge Racer 7's single-player game, and it will feature a number of different race events to compete in, including grand prix (multi-event races), time trials, single events, and manufacturer trials. By winning a manufacturer trial, you essentially open up a relationship with a car or part manufacturer; as a result, that company's parts are available for purchase when it comes time to customize the cars you own.

Ridge Racer has traditionally been about fictional car makes and models and, with Ridge Racer 7, you're going have tons of rides to choose from, and lots of options for customizing them. Dubbed the "machine connector," the customization tool in Ridge Racer 7 lets you make a multitude of cosmetic changes to your cars, with new rims, paint jobs, decals, and body kits for various segments of your ride. More importantly, you can also affect the handling of your car with new engine parts, nitrous kits, and plug-ins. With the nitrous setups, there are a number of different options: kits with more than three nitrous "cells" to fill up, giving you more boosts to access; nitrous systems with less capacity but more power; or nitrous kits that feature a single cell of nitrous. This last one seems more flexible, as you can enable and disable the nitrous simply by pressing and letting go of the nitrous button; traditional Ridge Racer nitrous systems use an entire cell of nitrous once you've pressed the button. Plug-ins are additional parts you can add to your car to give it a specific advantage, such as guaranteed rocket starts off the line and many others.

Ridge Racer 7 has been developed to be online-aware throughout all parts of the game. At the main menu, you'll notice a status screen on the right-hand side of the screen that shows your progress in various aspects of the game, such as miles driven, cash collected, online matches won, online battle points earned, and fame ranking. The game will keep track of your success both offline and online, and you'll always have an idea of where you stand compared to other Ridge Racer players. In addition, a constantly updating ticker at the bottom of the screen will provide you with recent race results, game news, and even brief "hero interviews," which are short messages from RR7 players who have beaten the grand prix mode or completed other achievements in the game.

Setting up for online play in RR7 is simple. As mentioned earlier, we had a chance to go up against seven Namco QA folks in a handful of races to get a feel for how the online works. Though we played an eight-man race, the game does feature races that will support up to 14 players. After entering the online lobby, which shows off that unmistakable Ridge Racer menu design, we hit the created room and before long, we were off to the races. As an aside, the loading times in the game are quite acceptable, both online and offline, partly because the game installs a number of files, such as cars and tracks, to your PS3 hard drive.

We tried three races online--two single-player races and one team-based event. The single-player races were smooth and lag-free and had a more manic, bump-and-run feel than your typical, slightly more polite offline races. We say this even though the Namco folks we raced against, who had managed to open up a healthy lead on us by the third lap, all politely stopped just short of the finish line to let us win (we always knew QA guys were classy). The second race was more hard-fought, even if we still had the vague impression that they were toying with us. In between races, you can quickly chat with the other folks in the room using preset phrases that have been organized into a number of categories such as prerace comment, postrace comment, reply, and the like. You can target specific players or everyone in the room simply by choosing their names from a list.

This chat system was particularly helpful during the third and final race we ran, a team-race event where the idea was for teammates to finish as high in the running order as possible, and thus earn the most total points. Before the race, our teammates planned our strategy by suggesting tactics such as "I'll block" and "Let's slipstream," which we could then reply to. With our strategy in place, we hit the track and tried to make it happen. Once on the road, it was a matter of hooking up with teammates to take advantage of one another's slipstreams to gain a speed boost, or viciously blocking opposing players from getting around us. Without a doubt the team battle was our favorite event of the bunch, thanks in no small part to the manic, ever-changing strategies needed to keep the team in contention.

Ridge Racer 7 has all the makings to be another fun entry in the Ridge Racer series, and it looks to take advantage of some of the best aspects of what the PlayStation 3 will offer. We look forward to seeing more of the game in the future and will bring you a full review of the game when the PS3 launches in just a scant few weeks.