Ridge Racer
Namco and Sega had a bit of a rivalry back in the 90’s and Namco trumped Sega’s Model 1 board with the System 22 arcade board and the first game to utilize it was Ridge Racer back in 1993.
Everything about Ridge Racer is ahead of its time. The techno soundtrack, the tracks and the thrills of racing around and beating the clock.
Ridge Racer also was a launch game for the PS1 and helped shift a ton of Playstation’s back in 1994/95.
If you can find this, you have to play the ridiculously large ‘Full Scale’ version with you in the seat of an actual Mazda MX-5 and a huge 20 foot curved screen to totally immerse yourself in the action. Who cares if it still costs £5 a go to play, this is arcade racing and gaming history!
Daytona USA
Sega sees your Ridge Racer Namco and goes all in with Daytona USA.
When Daytona USA first came out in 1994 (or 1993 in some lucky test arcades) it instantly became a classic. So much so that even today many arcades still have this epic racing game sitting pride of place amongst the gambling machines.
The game has force feedback steering, the ability to drift and the trademark four views are carried over from Virtua Racing and it just looks stunning with its bright and colourful graphics and catchy music.
This is in our opinion quite possibly the best arcade racing game ever made and the fact that so many arcades still have it shows that punters agree too.
It doesn’t matter what version you play as its great fun both solo and with up to eight players battling it out in epic races.
If you want to play it at home the Xbox 360 version is the definitive one with HD graphics, it looks better than the arcade version.
If you go even earlier then the Dreamcast version looks stunning with extra tracks and cars to choose from too and for the Sega Saturn it must be the CCE edition which fixed a lot of things from the launch version.
