A bowling game developed by Konami and released only in arcades. Here you can choose from a select amount of Simpsons characters, each with their own unique stats and ending animations.
Bowling has always been one of the main pastimes shown in the actual show and several characters have had plots involving bowling, or the location Barney’s Bowlarama, where Homer sets up a minor Bowling league, or where Marge tries to take an interest in Bowling and nearly end’s up having an affair. It would also appear in the background, Homer would occasionally be seen playing bowling. With Bowling being a popular concept of The Simpsons, it’s inevitable they would make a game out of it.
Despite running on PlayStation-based hardware, the game was only released in arcades. It’s possible a home port was planned but was abandoned when Konami lost the Simpsons license
Gameplay
There are two types of game modes that can be selected: Standard Game – Typical bowling mode, on default settings you can score up to 300 points across 10 frames. Spares Game – Same as standard, but there is a money mechanic. The player needs to make the most money in order to win. The bowling pins are randomly selected and require a lot more strategy in order to win
The game has the option of a normal control scheme or an easier mode. The difference is the process of firing the bowling ball, the easy mode just requires you to spin the trackball to launch the bowling ball, whilst the normal mode requires you to press the 1P button when the icon moves in the green area, sort of like a QTE/Timing minigame. Both modes can then be chosen by the players instead of the arcade operator.
You can change your character’s starting positions, and adjust the curve on their ball with is a key component of scoring.
Lets take Ridge Racer, but with bikes instead of cars
There are two main opponents and a couple of AI drone racers that done affect your rank. It’s best to stay away and avoid these since should you collide, you risk crashing and falling off your bike which will waste time and allow the over racers to overtake. As with all Namco AI it will cheat and rubberband to ensure they are right behind you.
The viewpoints in the game can be changed with the dedicated view change button, which also function as the select button in many of the games menus. There are three views in total, one close to the bike, one far from the bike and a first person view. Some players may control the game better with a certain viewpoint.
As with all Namco game, the game has a pretty good soundtrack and makes use of the Namco C352 sound chip
Machines
Anthias – Novice, easy to handle and maneuver but falls short in the top speed. I would use this bike for the first few game of a track to get a handle of the basics of the game. NVR 750R – Intermediate, a good machine to master since is has a balance of handling and speed, turning gan be an issue due to the weight of the motor itself Wild Hog – Advanced, a pain to handle but has quick acceleration. The name might be a pun on Wild Dog from Time Crisis, which was released in the same year NVR 750RSP – Hidden Black Anthias – Hidden Peggy – A pengium who rides on a scooter, currently only playable via a MAME cheat
Handling in the game is determined by the size and weight of the machine you choose. This will affect the drifts which are required to get a good score in the game.
Courses
Green Hill – The beginner course and very reminiscent of the courses from Ace Driver or Ridge Racer. There’s plenty of scenery within the environment that gives an impressive amount of detail Neo Yokohama – The more advanced course, set in a city an night with plenty of tall skyscrapers. This one has a few difficult turns to learning and mastering drifts is a must.
Other Info
Clips of the game were included in the music video for Republica – Ready To Go (Original, not the rock version), Virtua Fighter 2 is also shown
Cyber Cycles was not released for home consoles, and remained an arcade only title.
Road Rash meets Wipeout in a futuristic bike racing game, And another game Sega forgot to port to home consoles
Two game modes are on offer, championship and practice. Championship is the main game mode and sets the player accords different tracks. The first track is always Yendas, depending on what position the player can then will dictate which plant race track will be played next. Other players can be attacked by pressing the punch and kick buttons. Holding down the punch button will charge the attack which will deal further damage and will knock off the rider. You can also lock an attack on another player with your weapon, Weapons can be lost if you are attacked, or if you throw and attack it with another player.
Turbo mode can be activated by pressing the accelerate button repeatedly. This is hard to pull of when your playing on a keyboard since the game was designed for analogue controls, which makes it hard when you are playing with digital controls. If can take a couple of attempts for the game to register. The Turbo meter in the bottom left screen will recharge after a few seconds, and the payer can activate it immediately or wait a few moments for it to charge fully, where it will have the best effect. As with all futuristic racing gasme, techno music dominates the soundtrack and is drivern by the Sega SCSP spund trip.
The game runs on the Sega Model 2A arcade board, the same that Manx TT Superbike ran on. The games test mode allows several settings to be amended that affect the difficulty of the game, the amount of laps the player needs to race and the engine sound level. Like other Model 2 racing games, cabinets can be linked together to allow multiplayer games with other players.
Characters:
There are four characters to choose from, each with different stats which affect the gameplay. Robin: Best grip IO: Best attack Gunz: Best speed Gelia: Best acceleration Each character has their own voice which can be heard when attacking and activating turbo mode. There is a back story for each character.
Tracks
Yendas: The first and easiest track to race on, and is basically a loop track. Placing first in championship will progress onto Junos, otherwise Ido will be the next track if 2nd or lower. Ido: Set on a planet with a load of flying bugs (These dont affect the gameplay) Junos: A snow/arctic planet with some tough corners Reef 8: Lots of water in this one and has a few tight bends Bowel: Sent on a volcanic planet, thunder can be heard in the background Segal: A bonus track that appears when you get a good score in Champtionship mode, but can also be accessed by pressing a cheat code on the track selection screen. Rumored to be named after Stephen Segal
A lot of the environments of the track reminds me of that Sonic Saturday AM cartoon with how dystopian some of them look. If you’ve played Wipeout XL/2097 it has a very similar astethic.
Emulators
Nebula Model 2: Capable of running the game fully but is dated and has a few inaccuracies
MAME: Latest revision is capable of playing the game somewhat but has a multitide of issues, some of the texture mapping is incorrect.
The third arcade instalment of the Ridge Racer series, and the first actual sequel/spin-off, since Ridge Racer 2 was mostly the same as the original except for the revised soundtrack, a revised HUD and multiplayer support.
The music has also been revised with some completely new tracks covering techno/house and electronica genres, and some familiar ones – rare hero returns as a remix. Sadly this gets ruined by the two race announcers who insist on polluting the sound-waves with their rambling takes. The first one is a female sounding voice who is supposed to be the main announcer and has a tendency to repeat the same lies constantly (Go GO GOO This race is yours!!!) She also voices the attract screen. The second announcer is a male voice who seems to be one of the rival cars.
Emulation
Vivanonno
The original emulator for the game that was released in 2002, now has been eclipsed by MAME. Vivanonno could emulate most of the effects but has issues with the car shadows which can dissapear. Like Ridge Racer 2 however, there are a few geometry inaccuracies.
Texture Filtering
Left has filtering disabled and is how it would have appeared on the actual system, right has filtering enabled.
Other
Cars are slightly sunk into the track, but lift up when the race starts
Nintendo 64 Version?
Possible leaked build of the game running on the N64?
Its just the Vivanonno version with the texture reduction set to the highest option, but if it did come to the N64 it may have looked soomething like this.
Mjolnir
This was a fork of MAME and had the goal of emulating the Namco System 22/21 games with hardware acceleration. This had the benefit of better emulation performace since the graphics processing was offloaded onto the GPU.
Sadly Mjolnir was abandoned and the latest build is based off a very old version of MAME, which means System 22 emulation is very primitive and many graphics issues are present with the emulation being incomplete. As a result its difficult to play givern the graphics issues with this build. Also it uses an older ROM set which makes it incompatable with the currernt MAME sets.
A fork of MAME now allows for link play with selected System 22 games. Unfortunately it is far from perect and only seems to work with only 2 players reliably.
Track selection screen with link play enabled
Meanwhile other linked machines will advertise that they are able to join in, the top two are displayed on the idle machines whilst the bottom is displayed on the machine that initated the link paly.
Left: the test mode configuration. Each machine needs to have a unique car colour and CPU number, which allows each machine to identify each toher. On the right the attract screen when link play is detected
A two player game from both players view. The time is different on both machines because the right has the difficulty settings set to easy mode (H). Seems each machine can have their own independant game configuration. Infact you can have one machine set to complete three laps, whilst the other has to complete five, which does not seem fair. Perhaps Namco would assume the operator had to ensure all systems had the same configurations set?
One has 3 laps, the other has 5. Also both are marked as lap leader
Whilst its possible for two players to play this way, when trying to play with four players there seems to be a few issues. I would assume System 22 networking works on the basis it transmits network packets in a broadcast fashion, like UDP. When playing a ‘four’ player game it seemed that one machine was sending data to one machine, whilst receiving data from another which caused some interesting effects with the map display. Despite setting each machines IP address (emulated through MAME instance, the arcade board has no TCP/IP support) to be unique. It works on some sort of token ring like topology where one machine recieves data and then sends it on a different physical port to another machine, basically every machine has an input and output.
Its also possible that this is due to the early emulation, and may be improved in later releases.
Namco always put a lot of detail into the track environments of their Ridge Racer games, and there are many references to their other arcade and console titles via the use of track billboards or building signs. A lot of this detail gets missed do to how fast paced the game is, and the arcade nature of the game. Many players are not going to stop and admire the buildings close up, which is where MAME and the no-collision cheats comes in.
Once nice detail that gets over looked, in the demo attract sequence, you can see the brake discs heat up as they are applied!
Novice Track
This is the same novice track from the first Ridge Racer game, but has updated textures which give it a more detailed look. Some buildings have been altered but the layout of the track remains the same.
The crowd looks different compared to the Ridge Racer version.
The end of the alternative tunnel path, which is normally blocked off and inaccessible. Seems to lead into the abyss…
Outside of the bridge in the first segment of the track
Closer view of the shops,
Getting a closer view of the shops near the beach
Driving in the grass, the peds here are unanimated
Hotel Ghost?
Out of the track and a view of the tower in the background, unfortunately we cannot drive to it since it disappears
Laperopter?
Building that reads Nyanta Nyanta, unsure what that means
On the novice track there is a section that is blocked off, which leads to a track on the Advanced course, driving past here just leads to a empty void, since the world here isn’t populated
Another view from a out of bounds perspective
Namco advertising their TR3 chipset that was Co-developed by Evans&Sutherland. Billboard reads Texture mapping Real-Time Real-Visual rendering system
An advert for that other fighting game Namco is known for
Driving on the sea, a closer look at the boats
City
A new track that was previously exclusive to Rave Racer but has since reappeared in the PSP version of Ridge Racer, This one is set in a more urban environment with a rolling highway.
At the start of the track you can turn around 180 degrees and drive through a highway, you can do this without the use of cheats. You can drive until you reach a tunnel, where the game teleports you back out of the tunnel at a higher speed.
A no-clip like view of the world
A look at the city, and a Pac&Pal store
Another system 22 advert, namco were really pround to show their arcade technology off
Another TR3 billboard
Mappy.png
I don’t know if the transparency was intentional or they just forgot
Another noclip like view, except im nearly colliding with a helicopter. Theres no collision data so your car just clips right through the heli
View of the stadium, where LiberoGrandetakes place
Mountain
An alternative view of the mountain track, which normally cannot be seen within the game
Carefull…
I later learnt that this is an invisible wall, but when your collides with it at a certain speed the game teleports you to the bottom section, Driving into it at 10mph would just cause the car to bounce back to the track.
Some sort of casino??
Roadside Sign
A gas station for when you need to refill your car, although this inst a game mechanic, cars in Ridge Racer do not have fuel
Who’s that?
Cup Ball, some sort of bowling center?
Buildings have no rendering data at the back of them, so the textures just disappear
Same Laperopter building in the first track
Better view of the spooky hotel ghost, seems Namco recycled building models to conserve ROM space
Going up the ramp, however the car clips through it
These tracks would remain exclusive to the arcade, and would not appear in any console version until the PSP version of Ridge Racer, I wonder what changes were made and if any buildings were kept?
Ridge Racer 2 was a slight update to the series, adding linkable multiplayer and a revised soundtrack with several new tracks in addition to remixed versions of the original.
The announcer voice has been altered slightly, and has several new links in response to the players driving ability.
Some graphic effects have changed, whilst the textures are mostly similar to the original, the lighting effects have changed with RR2 using a hue/fog effect to simulate the day to night cycle, rather then the original which dimmed and changed the Sky texture.
Lastly a rear view mirror has been added, which required a redesign to the HUD.
Emulation – MAME Vs Vivanonno
Emulation for the game has improved over the years with the MAME System 22 core benefiting from being years in development, whilst Vivanonno has not been updated since 2003. Between the two emulators there are some diferentces in the rendering, with there being some unique advantages between the two.
Mame is considered to be more accurate to the arcade version, but Vivanonno has some advantages like texture filterning which System 22 is not capable of. This gives the game textures a less blocky appearance.
Comparison
Vivanonno on the left, MAME (238) on the right
Night Time Effects
The MAME version now has a black ‘fog’ effect that covers the track at night, compared to Vivvanonno which misses the effect and leaves the track at full draw distance.
Billboard
This flickers on Vivanonno but works fine on MAME
Cars not aligned correctly on track
The cars on the Vivanonno version are sunk into the track slightly and are missing the shadows. The brightness is also different, also notice the curve of the car, above where it says RIDGE
Score screen error
Not all of the textures appear on the Vivanonno version
Texture Bleeding
Some of the road textures bleed or overlap, causing the effect
Chevrons
On Vivanonno the chevrons will dissapear at a cetain angle, noticable when you are drifiting.
Link Play
A fork of MAME allows for limited linked play with both instances of MAME, at the moment this is currently running on one machine but should be possible over a local area connection. However latency will be tight since these arcade machines were meant to be linked close together which rules out internet play.
Screen this is displayed when waiting for other players to join, the attract screen on the linked machines changes to indicate players can join.
Starting position for both machines in one game
Boundary break
Thanks to MAME and a few cheats (Drive Anywhere), the car can escape the track, allowing us to get a better view of the scenery.
Another look at the audience at the start of the track, exactly the same as the first Ridge Racer
A look at the buildings outside the track
The fake cars in the other side of the tunnel have changed slightly, they seem to have more detailed textures, but are now lacking wheels. Unless these are floating. anti-gravity cars?
View of the city at night, the game simply swaps the textures rather than apply lighting effects, and the skybox has changed
Drew1440: Blog 