“You are the man” – Ridge Racer (PSP)

I remember the massive British advertising push for the PlayStation Portable in the year following its launch. I was taking the tube every day and the distinctive adverts with their red text were unavoidable. There have been a lot of awful video game adverts, and a lot of awful PlayStation adverts specifically, many of which have made the leap from other countries to attention here. Juiced, it turns out, got advertised with a viral bit of supernatural non-consensual nudity which won an award. But encountering something on your daily commute is much more immediate than reading about its horror online. And I remember one specific PSP advert because it managed to pack so much needless exclusion into one line.

“Your girlfriend’s white bits here” is remarkably filled with assumptions. It could easily have been “your partner’s naughty bits here” and included many more groups of people than those with white girlfriends without being any less provocative. Maybe more provocative. It would still have been crass and cringe, but it wouldn’t have been… that. Unfortunately the dominant mainstream culture in video games since the ‘90s made the total assumption of a straight white male player it no big surprise. It wasn’t even the advert in the series which produced the most controversy, given another one they wanted to put on train platforms saying “Take a running jump here”.

Hanging prevailing juvenile sexism on the PSP Ridge Racer might seem slightly harsh, but this is my one and only chance to talk about the PSP on Super Chart Island, and Ridge Racer fits into some overarching issues that both affected the PSP and allowed that kind of thing to pass. The “white bits” advert was ostensibly to advertise the photo storage capabilities of the PSP, one of several new multimedia ideas built in, including the opportunity to watch films on a new disc format. None of those multimedia elements particularly took off, and they looked outdated well before the PSP’s successor arrived. The PSP launched in the era of the MP3 player, but the era of smartphones wasn’t far away, with the first iPhone released here just over two years later. So that left the games to be its big attraction.

The thrust of the approach with its games was for the PSP to offer a console game experience on the go. Its rival, the Nintendo DS, launched with Super Mario 64 DS, which had to make compromises to port a Nintendo 64 game. Meanwhile Ridge Racer, the PSP’s leading launch title, is a sort of remix album for a series of games which excelled on the PlayStation at a similar time, and has no trouble looking technically much better than those games. The cars themselves lack a little detail, but playing means mainly looking at the road ahead, and it’s an impressively smooth and detailed ride. There’s some extra nostalgia value in going back to familiar tracks from earlier games, but it’s not the only appeal.

Ridge Racer also has a terrific mechanic whereby drifting around corners builds up meters that eventually pay off with a big speed boost. Blasting straight past opponents as a result is almost as much fun as drifting past them in the corners. It’s simple and effective and makes for spells of arcade driving bliss that the series didn’t always come by so easily. It’s also very much a console game experience on the go, for all that it is one with a campaign which you can take on one race at a time, and that turned out to be a problem as well as an achievement.

In a sense, looking close to a PS2 game just helps to emphasise that Ridge Racer is not, quite, a PS2 game. And if you wanted to buy a Ridge Racer which was a PS2 game, well, Ridge Racer V already existed. The same sort of thing went for many of the PSP’s big titles, a kind of uncanny valley effect. They fell into the shadow of their sources in a way in which far more obviously compromised portable spin-offs like, say, Super Mario Land, did not. Ridge Racer is the only game I will be playing on PSP for Super Chart Island, but it is not the only game initially developed for PSP which I will be playing. Some of its games turned out to be such good extensions of popular PS2 games that they later got to #1… on PS2.

Plenty of more individual and better-suited games did get made for the PSP, from LocoRoco to Half-Minute Hero. Monster Hunter became a monster success in Japan through pushing the co-operative possibilities of its portability to the forefront. As with any format, there are many different worlds beneath the one this blog takes me to. And some of the lack of better mainstream options was a new European thing – compare the PlayStation where we got Wipeout at launch to the PSP launch where… we got Wipeout Pure, but no such equivalent of a new series. But the PSP’s biggest names that were pushed here showed a real lack of imagination, a sense that the limits of what games could be was already settled, along with who those games could be for. It’s the same lack of imagination that comes across in Ridge Racer’s announcer yelling out “you are the man!” in response to an overtake. And it’s ultimately the same lack of imagination, the same discriminatory tunnel vision, that led to putting out adverts that left huge numbers of potential players excluded.

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Top of the charts for week ending 3 September 2005:

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