Ridge Racer is an arcade racing game released for the PlayStation Portable in December 2004. As one of the first games I purchased for my PSP, it has always held some nostalgia for me. Replaying it now in 2023, however, I can see that my nostalgic love for this title was not ill placed.

The first portable outing for Ridge Race is truly a success. The graphics and gameplay from the other games in the series are ported beautifully to the PSP. From stunning sunsets to glistening paintjobs, Ridge Racer is no slouch when it comes to pushing the PSP's graphical capabilities. The gameplay is tight and responsive, with the series' drift mechanic translating seamlessly over to the PlayStation handheld. The introduction of the new NOS mechanic in the game is also fun, and adds an extra layer of depth to the races that I feel was missing in prior titles.

While there are several racing games on the PSP, none capture the magic that Ridge Racer presents for me. It's presentation is second to none and drifting around corners and blasting past opposing racers never gets old. Overall, I believe Ridge Racer more than deserves its spot as one of the best games on the PSP.

"Alan Wake 2 is a game that shows what videogames are capable of"

Well, I imagine that a large number of people, when reading this highlighted phrase, will imagine a game that demonstrates cutting-edge technology, photo-realistic visuals, or even surprising performance. But definitely not the case where I wanted to refer to that kind of thing.

Alan Wake 2 tries to push the limits of what is possible to present and (only) achieve through a game. Using different multimedia formats to convey a plot, whether through meta commentary, live action cinematic cutscenes, different forms of interaction in the environment and fourth wall breaks, may not be a new thing. But it is certainly the game that comes closest to what was idealized by Sam Lake throughout his career, by playing with these elements in a coherent way, and delivering an experience that is unlike ANY other game I have seen playing videogames for more than 20 years.

And speaking of which, I believe that the most important thing in a game is the experience it gives you, and without a doubt, Alan Wake 2 is a game that cannot be explained. I could say that it is one of the best survival horror titles of recent decades, going head to head with classics like Silent Hill 2 or the original Resident Evil, or I could even say that it has one of the best and most ingenious plots and ways of tell a story that you can find in any medium. But it doesn't make sense, nothing I can say could do him justice.

Alan Wake 2 is a game that needs to be experienced above all else, and I hope everyone can give it a chance someday.

Gaiden offers a heart wrenching return to the life of Kiryu, and while the intent for the series to pass the torch to a new protagonist, its experiences like these that feel bittersweet when theres so many directions you can take the franchise's legendary dragon. However that return to familiarity, both in protagonist and brawling gameplay, is short lived due to the consequences of development. Gaiden's evolution from an interlude in the upcoming Yakuza 8, to a standalone experience, kneecaps a lot of the deeper themes and meta-text. There is so much the story wants to say, and its consistency in how strong its writing is executed, feels undercut when 4 chapters in you find out its ready to end. I can only hope that 8 will deliver.

The conversion to a standalone game was also something done in an extremely short time, with only 6 months of development. While it's story manages to be top quality, the gameplay awkwardly drags it down a touch. Which is an unfortunate constant, Dragon Engine is never kind to kiryu, and all 3 of his games have had combat that ends up feeling sloppy, and undercooked. While Gaiden has taken improvements from the Judgment series, it's brisk time in the oven becomes very clear, as with tweaks the fighting could be stellar, in its current form I feel it's lacked playtesting.

The problem with this game in one example:

I was working with The Railroad, an underground movement attempting to take down the Institute.

The Institute made me their leader after I infiltrated them for the first time.

I thought, okay, now I can go back and relay to the Railroad that I'm now the leader of the Institute. You know, the group that our whole goal is to take down.

You can't. I felt like I was going insane when I walked back to the Railroad base and desperately tried talking to everyone to reveal this critical information about the war I was participating in. In that moment, the veil was lifted. This is not a world, it's a shooting gallery.

What is the point of even having a dialogue system if this very common occurrence that the main quest forces you down creates this level of dissonance due to a lack of options? Why even have factions? Why have dialogue? The game would not be any better or worse than it is now.

Update:
So, revisiting the game now in depth for the first time since it came out, I realize: there IS a whole side section of quests dedicated to exactly what I was talking about but it didn't trigger for me on my first run! This does make me feel less insane and I'm glad the game is more functional now, but it's insane that a bug occured nearly ten years ago and colored my perception of the entire story so strongly.

Why is it that the itty bitty sprite-based Fallouts let me blow up a locked door or pry it open with a crowbar, but this shiny, hundred million dollar PS4 game doesn’t?

I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.

This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.

Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.

To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.

I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.

Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.

This is what happiness feels like.

I waited MANY years to play any game from this timeless franchise and I gotta tell'ya, the wait was worth it. Simply put, the game is a masterpiece of epic proportions.

It has so many qualities that I could not mention them all here, but to summarize, playing this game is the same as traveling to a simpler, happier time of your life, where wonder and adventure were always by your side. This will make you question space, time, decisions you made and the very core purpose of life.

Thanks a whole lot for everyone involved in this perfect translation effort, the quality of the work you guys managed to pull off is second to none! Please, the other games in the series should also be translated! Let's make it happen, earthlings!

To finish this rambling off, I just wanna give you a trivia where the essence of the game is explained very easily.

The boy you control during the game is called 'Boku'.
'Boku' also means 'me' or 'I' in Japanese
So, who are we playing as?
We are playing as Ourselves!


Damn.

BREAKING NEWS: Huge BokuNatsu fan excited to play it for the 1st time

Ok to be honest, I don't think I could possibly express the sheer beauty of this game with words. That may seem like a cheap cop-out to avoid using more than 2 brain cells to write, but I truly mean it. No matter what I say here, I can't fully express what it's like to sit by the ocean with your fishing rod. I can't fully express the way the sunset shines through the trees while running through the forest, or just sitting on the bench on that path. I can't express how exhilarating it was to train my little stag to eventually sweep the floor with whatever bullshit level 3 bug on steroids Shigeru pulls out of his ass. I can't express the way I feel when walking in on even the simplest of conversations between any of the characters in this little oceanside town.

This game had me completely engaged and enthralled throughout the last 2 weeks. After a long day of toiling away through projects and work, I'd sit down and play through a few in-game days. As I went to bed and went throughout my day, it would be in the back of my mind. I cared immensely about the things I wanted to see and do, and the possibilities for what secrets this game could hold, and now that it's all over, all I can do is sit here and think about the countless ways it exceeded my expectations.

Please play this game. I cannot recommend it enough.

a few quick thoughts

- pacing a little poor in the front half of the game, side content is awkwardly crammed into the campaign as if to justify the price tag, if you took out all the non-story stuff the story probably sits at about seven to eight hours but as it stands it's probably like closer to twelve or so. that being said it picks up heavily after the halfway mark, enjoyed seeing 7 from an entirely different perspective... feels very culminative for kiryu as a character - i'm not immune to fanservice!

- was surprised to see hidenori shoji absent from the credits (unless i'm blind), but sega's entire sound team is of incredible talent and the music stands tall, chihiro aoki as music director is a treat

- combat feels closer to 6 than the judgment games which is a little disappointing, seems like they wanted to stick to the street fighting roots of the series and we're back to the weighty attacks and facetanking of the early DE games. it's a big step above those thankfully but still outdone by a few of its predecessors. additionally, despite there being two styles most combat encounters feel like they were designed explicitly for agent... regularly occurring waves of at least a dozen enemies at once call for gadget abuse, meanwhile yakuza has little to no crowd control options in comparison

- definitely the best iteration of the colosseum so far. while their movesets are largely afterthoughts, it's super cool that you can play as pretty much anyone you can recruit, and i enjoyed putting them to use in the hell team battles... i could do without the grinding though - practically necessary to burn through some of those hell team healthbars

- i appreciate this being a comparably concise package, you can experience pretty much everything it has to offer in fifteen hours or so, maybe one of the yakuza games i'll be itching more to revisit. substories can be hit and miss, a handful of great ones but also a good amount of them can feel like busywork. that being said, this is a constant in every yakuza game, and the scale of this one means there are proportionately less of those, so i think it's okay in this instance

- fucking bawled my eyes out at the ending man, seriously.... these games generally have very strong emotional cores but this takes the cake. death to all yakuza 3 skippers

this is a game made pretty explicitly for those who have experienced all of kiryu's story thus far - it's honestly harder for me to recommend it to those who have only played 7 even if this is mainly an interquel to 8, and i assume the events of this will be covered in that game regardless... that being said i really appreciate that they decided to go out of their way to make this. can't stress enough how insane of a package this is for six months of development time. i will be counting the days until infinite wealth.

Trim it down, to the best parts

Gaiden is essentially what they advertised, a small Kiryu...I mean Joryu adventure after the events of Yakuza 6 and during Yakuza: Like a Dragon story.

The story in this bite-sized adventure can very much rival mainline entries if you ask me. I'd recommend you to play Yakuza 6 to really understand what is going and why Kiryu ended up making deals to dissapear from his past life since it's pretty much a continuation of the latter. Unlike previous games it's not that convoluted and is pretty straightforward, it knows it's scope and plays with it nicely. At least, do it for the ending. Hits so much harder once you know who are those kids.

Don't think this game will have a lot of content on it's shoulders, in fact only the basics remain while some of the rest gets ditched or removed. And that's perfectly fine, this means this game has it's focus on the story first, content second. And while there is side-content to be enjoyed it's as basic as it gets. An excuse to level up, basically. During the story we'll meet this red haired chick "Akame" that gives us some missions to complete, this is how Gaiden handles substories and it mixes it with a completion tab. After completing a mission, we'll be gifted with both points and cash. To unlock new abilities you'll need both of them; Cash and Points. As I said before, it mixes both the completion tab and substories under one simple label "The Akame Network".

In case you have played The Kaito Files, the Lost Judgment story expansion you'll get a very similar feeling regarding it's scope, which differs from the main game. While in Gaiden we don't have clearly a game to be based on unlike The Kaito Files and Lost Judgment, it mannages to stand on it's own, even with a Frankestein-like structure. Technically speaking, Gaiden uses the latest rendition of the Dragon Engine which has seen several improvement over the years since it's debut with Yakuza 6. It takes elements from a lot of RGG games, like a ton and they're not afraid to say it so. Most of these assets went up being used in "The Castle", which if you have played previous Yakuza games you may recognize it as "The Colliseum".

"The Castle" is a free-for-all battle showdown where you can recruit fighter that can help you to overcome challenges. Familiar faces avaible as troops are definitely present in this mode. It's as complete as any Yakuza side-mode is and I wish they could expand more on this concept. Basically Mugen in a Yakuza game. It's the definitive timesink of this title and arguably the most fun I had with this game.

Combat takes huge inspiration from a lot of past Yakuza games, and it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. Even some Judgment and Lost Judgment mechanics makes it's first appereance on a mainline title. "Yakuza Style" is the signature style Kiryu has been using since the series began. Heavy charges, strong punches. It's somewhat close to Kiwami 2 combat system. And then we have "Agent Style", think of "Crane Style" from the Judgment games but with a few extra "Gadgets" added on top. The Gadgets are the key in this fighting style and it makes fighting hordes of enemies much easier to manage, while on bosses is ineffective at best, useless at worst. I'll be honest, the combat is not as good as Lost Judgment even if it releasesed two years after it. It's not as polish as you may expect and there is a lot of bullshit moments to occur, specially on boss fights. That's why I say "The Castle" is great, it doesn't requiere precision in the amount of chaos that is hapenning there and combat generally favours going against hordes of enemies rather than a simple oponent.

Gaiden feels like the series "Greatest Hits" album, carefully selecting the elements that makes this series unique. It does come at the cost of not feeling fully-fletched and having a unique "something" that makes each title special, but for a small sized adventure is a perfectly serviceable title to have while waiting for Infinite Wealth.