~ Estimated Reading Time: 3 min ~
I think about Naked Glow; the dynamic spins and turns, the never-stopping momentum intertwining with its beat switches. Some electric sensibilities for how each ebbs and flows to the racetrack itself - brass-driven bravado coming in the moment you start overtaking the competition. That optimistic final lap, offering you a taste of victory before you streak through the goal - and making any defeat set to this track more bitter. I hit a drift perfectly in time with the turntable sample and literally jolted out of my seat. video games tbh
I think about The Objective; the game's music audio completely overtaking its sound effects in volume, clawing at you through your car speakers with noise. The percussion and aggressive synths flowing in and out, suddenly forming around at the most desperate moments, the force of a claustrophobic tightness. Set to the stage of an aggressive rival tailing you, every time they slammed into the side of my car, this song put some fear in me
I think about Move Me; ....oh my god. There's a million layers worth focusing in on here. But I always find myself drawing towards that percussion - the drumbeat's ends chopped off, reversing and reverbing - giving the track this gliding, weightless feeling. As if finally putting the incomprehensible, physics-defying skidding and drifting I've been going through into tangible form. It felt so tailor-made for the game's climactic, 200 MPH final racetrack, that I willingly chose to replace the beautifully anthemic default song in favor of it.
It is a serious contender for most beautiful game I've ever played, as a whole audiovisual piece. One of those games you're either playing on official hardware and a CRT, or fiddling with your emulator for 15 minutes to get rid of any post-processing or upres. Its ephemeral beauty carried only to our reality by the handful of flashing pixels we're cruising through. Some ridiculous engineering on display here; I wonder how many sleepless nights were spent on every vertex. And for every rendering error, I'm thankful they didn't get stuck on perfectionism, and actually moved onto polishing out the rest to perfection. Equally would it be wrong to only credit this as a technical feat; you need some ridiculously trained eyes to capture reality as well as this game's art direction does. Each and every skybox shaded to convey something like the vague mixture of sunshine and fog forming a vividly hazy morning, or the peak of the day - the most delicateness of the dithering in its gradients suggesting both the morning before and the afternoon coming. I don't see artists capture something as simple as Time this effectively often - which is why Namco goes above that, conveying a whole Era. Its dedication to capturing reality is what makes it remain infinitely as a time capsule of the late 90s - of its slick but loud graphic design, and the Breakbeat club music that occupied its eves. The brazen newness of its tech providing it a blistering speed able to keep up with anything, other than the progressive, momentous yearning for improvement that would bring one to make Ridge Racer Type 4