I wanted to sit down with this one and give it another shot after playing ridge racer revolution for a bit; thanks to kingbancho's review and this extremely helpful thread on giant bomb I suddenly had a much better conception on how to play this game. you'll want to stay in 6th gear virtually all the time without ever releasing the throttle, and for tighter turns simply feather the brake and you'll slide into place with no fuss. first-person mode is also preferable, as it aligns much more closely with the d-pad motions than third-person does from my perspective. with this revelation, I managed to actually beat the four main challenges + beginner extra without losing a sweat. it made the game much more fun than when I originally tried it, but it's also a little deflating. a game with a significant amount of depth (esp an arcade-style game) should demand a cycle of struggle, understanding, and then application. each step you make towards understanding the holistic vision of the game should improve your results and introduce you to new challenges to face. here all it took was one "a-ha!!" moment and then the game was solved; leading to boredom setting in after around an hour of play. if anything I almost would've appreciated more required drifting, as there's only one hairpin on the course that actually requires an skid-marks-and-squealing-tires drift, with the rest being more like nudges with the brakes to get the car on track. nailing that one turn felt great whenever I did it, but it feels a bit as if daytona usa just had the beginner track with the one sharp turn at the end. it wouldn't be memorable if it didn't require you to apply those skills in more and more difficult scenarios, something that ridge racer struggles to do.

extra mode is a neat little add-on to prolong the experience at the very least. it's functionally a mirror mode, and the signs indicating sharper turns are not flipped, meaning that you'll need to remember the track more closely in order to succeed. the time limit is much tighter, the AI is more aggressive, and the sun will set causing turns ahead of you to melt into pitch black. a main issue that annoyed me greatly about this course: there's a bump where the original track start was that will cause your car to bounce at higher speeds, losing a significant amount of speed. on beginner it's not a big deal, just pull off the gas for a second or two before you hit the apex and you'll lose a single mph at the most, but on advanced you have to slow down much more significantly, making it almost useless to avoid it. the AI cars are not subject to this from my observations, which I find annoying: why bother making solely the player suffer this if the rest of the physics are so unrealistic anyway? I also ran into some collision annoyances with first-person mode; in at least one race an AI car clipped through my car, which instantly spun me out on the straightaway right before the finish line. after trying advanced extra for a bit, I found myself tiring of the track I had spent the last hour grinding on and decided to move on. still a solid psx launch title without question, and a suprisingly technically competant translation from the arcade to home.