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“I was really worried about that, I thought there must be some reason why that never seems to work out,” laughs Laakson.
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There's a fairly mixed history for Japanese franchises that are given over to Western developers for reinvention, though – for every Metroid by Retro Studios or Dead Rising 2 by Blue Castle, there's a Bionic Commando by GRIN, languishing in obscurity. It's about making sure that the gameplay itself is deep enough to keep the attention for a long time, rather than it being purely about spectacle.” In order to do well, you have to be super-focussed, but we think we've found ways to do that without making it very difficult to play. We've tried to keep that intensity, but make it a bit more accessible. There's an audience out there that wants to go fast, wreck something, enjoy the exhilaration, not so much the technical execution of how you're driving. “Shift's been interesting, they've been doing well with the sim side of things, but I don't see games like that and GT as our competition. There still seems to be a demand for this easier to play, more accessible driving experience. “I'm very happy that NFS Hot Pursuit did well if it hadn't I'd be very worried at this point. “I think that the more accessible side of racing games is going through a bit of a crisis at the moment,” says Joonas. It's disconcerting at first, but it's a cool effect. Information like your current position, lap times et cetera appear on buildings on the background as you drive past, rather than sitting permanently in a corner of the screen. The nicest thing about Unbounded at the moment is its presentation. It's not like two separate things – you can't play the game just as a pure racer, you're also going to have to be able to take the environment into account.” “You have to be able to manage the whole. “We spent a lot of time making sure that the environmental destruction actually has an effect on the race, that it plays a role in how you do,” says Laakso, eager to dismiss the suspicion that it's all just for show. In this hands-off demonstration, pieces of track are flying all over the place – you can drive straight through things that would crumple the car immediately in any other racer. Activating destruction power then sends you crashing through a wall, building or billboard in gratuitous slow motion, unlocking the shortcut for the next circuit or setting up a trap for racers behind you.Īnything smaller or lighter than a car can be driven over (or through) with no adverse effects to your own vehicle. As you race the tracks, little yellow icons indicate pieces of the track that can be driven through or destroyed. Instead of laid-back, dreamy, almost spiritual drift racing, then, we have quite aggressive, in-your-face street racing, with the tagline “Drive, Destroy, Dominate”. “It was always something that we looked at, and then made our own version, and that seems to be what Namco Bandai is after.” But we didn't bring anything over wholesale,” he says. “What we did was take the Ridge Racer franchise and find the things that we can use naturally. Joonas makes no bones of the fact that Unbounded has little in common with the franchise whose name it bears. It's more along the lines of Split/Second (or, to a lesser extent, Burnout), and fits in nicely with a growing, jostling community of spectacular, accessible, destruction-focussed racers. We see no boost gauge at all, in fact, and no drifting, and no reappearances of the iconic tracks that have recurred in practically every Ridge Racer game since time began. None of the elements that traditionally define a Ridge Racer game are present.
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It's a new direction for the series, an arcade racer where you drive through buildings in slow motion rather than drifting elegantly around enormous sweeping curves in an effort to fill your boost gauge. But then, neither is “Soulcalibur”.Īnyway, it's not the problem that most people on the Internet seem to have with Unbounded, which is that it's not Ridge Racer 8. I still think the opposite of “bound” is “unbound”, but Joonas argues that the title refers to the loosely organised group of street racers that star in the game, who are known as “the Unbounded”. When Bugbear Entertainment's Joonas Laakso presented the game to a group of journalists in Dubai a few weeks ago, there was a brief five-way argument about this. I have a problem with Ridge Racer: Unbounded, and that problem is that I'm pretty sure “unbounded” isn't a real word.
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We talk to producer Joonas Laakso about what it's trying to achieve.ĭeveloped in Finland by Bugbear Entertainment. Namco-Bandai unveils a very different take on Ridge Racer, masterminded by Finnish studio Bugbear.