Riiiiiiiidge Racer is a phrase that will have haunted the nightmares of a certain generation of gamers for years. Namco's brilliant arcadey racing title has gone the way of the dodo, as the trend for driving simulators has tended away from the fun and towards the realistic with the likes of Forza and co. The Ridge Racer series was always best played in an actual arcade, sat in a mock driver's seat and controlling the drifty madness with a pretend steering wheel, pedals and gear stick. Namco always had trouble translating that to consoles, and made a particularly ill-fated stab in the dark when it came to Ridge Racer Type 4's Jogcon, which came packaged with the game and was designed to combine the function of a steering wheel controller, while maintaining the size of a standard PlayStation controller. It...it didn't work. Steering wheel controllers exist in a sort of binary state. Either they're actually steering wheels or they're not. Otherwise they don't really work. A bastard child of a regular DualShock and a steering wheel offers the worst of both worlds, with the 3-inch wheel placed where the analogue sticks would usually lie which are actually designed to make playing games easier. That weird little dial controller thing just made things more complicated, with a really unnatural hand placement to hold down the accelerator X button and jostle the weird disc next to it. Like rubbing your tummy and patting your head, but if your anatomy was really messed up. Like a Picasso painting or something.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
