So today, Craig and I met up in town to get train tickets for this Saturday, before we did so however, we got a chance to play the PS3 in electronics store CEX (yes, it is pronounced like its spelt )

The experience was a bit tainted from the start however because they wouldn’t let customers get their hands on the new motion sensing ‘SIXAXIS’ controller so we had to settle for a couple of USB connected DualShock2 (that reminds me, whatever happened with that whole MagicGate thing?) controllers.

The game we got to play (much to my excitement!) was Ridge Racer 7 on a 32″ HDTV display. I’m no expert on HD displays as almost no one in this country has HD displays yet so I don’t know what output rate it was set to. The game itself looked super impressive with some of the sleekest looking menu GUIs I’ve ever seen. The blue and black design for the crisp menus gave it an impressive futuristic feel, especially with the embedded options for online play.

However the actual game itself suffered. I do admit the game looks very nice but be it due to over hype on my/marketing’s part, it really didn’t seem to be the graphical revolution as it was going from the PS1 to PS2. The game is trying very hard to seem lifelike and pulls it off quite well on the whole, the only bad thing about the graphics are the blatant low-resolution textures in the background which can only really be seen if your looking out for them which is a plus. Overall the game looks pretty but falls back in some aspects.

The game play itself seemed very last generation, which was a bit disappointing. I’m a huge fan of Ridge Racer but the game still suffers from the same errors it suffered with back in the first iteration, 7 games down the line! When you hit walls and corners your car sort of jumps around and skips forward really unnaturally, this combined with the truly unrealistic and over the top drifting feature is something I feel could definitely have been worked on. During my first minute in game I was uncontrollably drifting around from left to right being automatically turned round corners until I got my bearings with the analogue stick. Maybe this is due to it being developed for the motion sensing SIXAXIS controller however. After being a long-term fan of the series for so long, I have a feeling that Namco keep these errors in for nostalgias sake as it seems to me that Ridge Racer is meant to be more like a racing game (much like OutRun and its superb sequel), than a driving simulator a la Gran Turismo and Project Gotham Racing.

Sadly due to it being a shop environment, I didn’t get to listen to the soundtrack (which is the best part of all Ridge Racer games in my opinion) but it was nice to see the track listing looked completely new and not rehashed from the 360 version (much like everything in this game) as well as the choice to have your own music in game “purchased from the SONY online store”.

Overall, I left my first PS3 experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Being such a long time fan of Ridge Racer and considering the huge hype surrounding this console, I can’t help but feel that my high expectations of the game and the console has tainted my experience with it.

I have read elsewhere that this is more like a Ridge Racer 6.5, I truly couldn’t agree with this more, almost all of the tracks (if not all) seem to be taken directly from the 360 version (which contained a lot of tracks from the PSP version) but upgraded with prettier graphics and ‘motion sensing’ capabilities. Overall though, in my opinion, this is a very typical launch title, not living up to the expectations of others due to over hype.

Watch out for Craigs impressions later…