Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Next Car Game may well be a working title, but that hasn’t stopped Bugbear from setting up camp at nextcargame.com. The video, below, is “all in-game footage” and it looks like a rock ‘em sock ‘em destruction derby. Hurrah! The developers FlatOut games aren’t entirely about crashing cars but it’s an activity that is very much encouraged. The vehicles in Bugbear’s racer aren’t the delicate flowers of the Burnout series, which need to reset after all but the gentlest of collisions, the FlatOut rustbuckets fight, scraping, grinding and running each other off the road. Hopefully we’ll know more about the studio’s next car game, Next Car Game, soon.

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I’m hoping Ridge Racer Unbounded will contain all the motoring mayhem that I crave. Although the full game’s most interesting component may be its Trackmania style building options, the demo is just a single race as far as I know. It’s downloading right now but my internet connection seems to be ailing slightly and is barely capable of propelling these words into your face, never mind downloading a city full of shiny speedboxes. Let’s hope this trial run scratches my crashy, smashy itch a little better than Dirt: Showdown’s did.

If there was a three-way pile-up of Ridge Racer, FlatOut and Trackmania, where they all hit with such force that the tangled mess of wreckage fused together and not even surgery could separate them, then when the doctor removed the bandages (you know, after he’s tried to operate on this broken metaphor) what would be revealed would be Ridge Racer Unbounded. I’ll confess, I didn’t know that Namco’s spiffing looking racing game was being made by the same developers of the FlatOut series, but all the latent excitement I’ve had about it now makes sense. But for them to take something as speedy as Ridge Racer, mix-in the physics of FlatOut and then go and toss in an editor that’s inspired by Trackmania, my interest is no longer just latent. Video is below-low-lo.
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We’ve already had a slight glimpse at Namco Bandai’s upcoming Ridge Racer Reboot by way of a fairly flashy trailer, but now, courtesy of automotive-specialists VVV Gamer, here’s some fresh (off screen) footage showing what a pair of races in the new Ridge Racer might look like. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a long time since Namco Bandai last made any noise about their reboot of the Ridge Racer series, but with Gamescom just around the corner, they’ve readied a trailer hinting towards an emphasis on city-building and car-smashing. City-building! Some of the first proper footage of Ridge Racer: Unbounded lies herein:

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Via Blues I notice that Japanese driving franchise Ridge Racer (Riiiiiiiidge Raaaceeeerrrrr) is, for the first time, coming to the PC! Yes. But not the Ridge Racer you know and potentially love. No. In the increasingly common practice of Japanese publishers farming their licenses out to Western games developers, Namco Bandai has given Helsinki-based devs Bugbear (makers of the popular racing series FlatOut) the task of constructing Ridge Racer: Unbounded. And it’s… well, take a look at the trailer below.
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