Ridge Racer V
Generally touted as PS2’s top launch game, Ridge Racer V was
 released in Japan with much fanfare. Famitsu Weekly, Japan’s
 premiere gaming magazine, gave it a perfect score. Most other
 magz and web sites seem to have followed that trend so far.
 Guess what? It’s not true!

Plagued by a lack of extras and poorly-pronounced English 
background comments, this game was clearly rushed out of 
development in order to meet the March 4 deadline. What comes 
across to the consumer is a mediocre racing game with extremely
 good graphics. But, for PS2, the bar for graphics is raised
 quite a bit, so we can’t even give it a perfect score in that 
aspect. 

The game is full of flagrant design flaws. During a single-
player race, there are only two (count ‘em, two!) available 
viewing angles, and during multiplayer games, only one! Since 
the third person view of the car absolutely sucks, you are stuck
 with the bumper-cam view for the whole time. Nintendo 64’s 
launch racer, Cruisin’ USA, had 3 available angles… and that was
 in 1996.

The game is very Americanized, but the developers, most of whom 
must not speak a word of English, made some major slip-ups. The 
entire game is accompanied by a radio DJ announcing the events 
of the race in English, complete with comments like “that was 
tite” and “wicked.” However, there are some hilarious 
mispronunciations that almost made us puke when we first heard 
them. When you and another car bump on the track, you might 
hear, “That was too close for KOM-fort!” Occasionally during the
 race, there is talk of “veterans and ROOOO-kies,” or you are
 given “KAHN-gratulations!”

Fortunately, the new Ridge Racer girl, Ai Fukami, makes only a 
cameo appearance at the beginning of the game. If you’ve ever 
seen her, you’d understand why this is fortunate. And if you 
thought her name was sexually tainted in English, guess what it
 means in a native Indian dialect: “we screw our mothers.” 
Honest to God, it’s true. We're starting to think that Namco is 
run by the animators from Disney. 

The learning curve is also way to high. It took us the better 
part of a week to master the release-gas, skid, turn combination
 that was the only way to avoid riding the wall. And don’t even
 try Normal or Hard mode… the cars will blow you away every
 time.