Ridge Racer Type 4

Lads mags seemed horrifying to me even at the time I was a young lad. I’m not saying that to make any claims for how enlightened I was (because I wasn’t), but because I just didn’t get it. I’ve rarely felt so completely alien as the time on a school trip that a group of boys and a (female) teacher were leafing through FHM and assembling their theoretical sexiest woman out of sexiest body parts of sexy women. This just didn’t register with anything about how I experienced attraction or thought about the world, then or since, and even the painful consequences of not fitting in weren’t enough to fake otherwise.

Going through magazines looking for charts, it’s very obvious that the UK games press took a turn towards the lads mag approach in the late ‘90s, right alongside the endless covers of Lara Croft in poses you wouldn’t see in the games, and sexist adverts for just about anything. Exemplifying this trend was Future’s Arcade magazine, which ran for two years from the end of 1998. It couldn’t get through a chart with FIFA 99 ahead of Tomb Raider III without framing it as “it’s official, then – footy beats birds”, and its regular features included a ‘virtual fox’ each issue. They even published a calendar of those pin-ups, which included both the digital Lara Croft and Nell McAndrew, her designated real-world model at the time. And alongside them, among others, is the cover star of the third issue of Arcade, labelled only as “Ridge Racer cutie”.

Arcade’s 1999 virtual fox calendar. Photo via ebay.

For those in the know, she did have a name, Reiko Nagase, and she is on the cover of Ridge Racer Type 4 and the star of its FMV intro as well. Grid girls had been present in the previous Ridge Racer games, too, but they were never so explicitly a major selling point of them. More than that, when Sony showed off an early glimpse of the technology of the PlayStation 2 in 1999, the tech demo started with an improved Reiko Nagase, walking down a chequered catwalk and winking. The power of upgraded hardware was presented first as being able to get a clearer look at a woman who was, after all, created just for looking at. That attitude towards women was a long way from being confined to British magazines.

If it stopped there, it might not be my dominant impression of Ridge Racer Type 4. The racing is massively improved from Ridge Racer Revolution. The arcade spectacle is turned down, but it still looks stunning and the result is an aesthetic which is much more in tune with the driving experience. There is some clear influence from Gran Turismo (and the new-look course maps look identical), and the result is a very effective hybrid, less straight-laced than Ridge Racer’s new rival but with some of the same depth. The design has a welcome focus on the racing as well as the scenery; the series of slaloming slight turns at the end of the Wonderhill track, tantalisingly close to navigable at full speed, is a joy. Giving more prominence in the soundtrack to the music is also a wise decision, and its selection of feelgood dance tracks is a much better fit than Gran Turismo’s background Britrock scuzz. A bit derivative, though, I thought, until I realised that the specific tracks I was reminded of, iiO’s “Rapture” and Stonebridge’s “Put ‘em High”, both came from a few years later.

There’s even a grand prix campaign mode which, while not as thoughtfully structured as that in Cool Boarders 2, presents a series of increasingly difficult tasks in an enjoyable sequence. That mode is also where the poisonous side of Ridge Racer Type 4 comes to the fore, though. You can choose to race for one of four different teams, and before and after each race you get semi-animated comments from the team manager/owner. Three of the teams are led by men, who have varying different attitudes towards you but are very much in charge. Then there’s the French team Micro Mouse Mappy, marked as the game’s easy option. You get their owner, Sophie Chevalier, and all of her bits are about how she’s been drafted into the role through family connections and is completely clueless about anything to do with cars and racing.

If there was any doubt about the sexist attitudes behind the focus on grid girls, trotting out such regressive stereotypes in support of such weak humour removes it.