They truly each have their own personalities. And practicing never feels like a chore, because it’s thoroughly rewarding to get to grips with each of the handful of cars on offer. This is not an easy game, but it’s also certainly beatable - a pain in the arse, but fair about it. In fact, it might just be the greatest pure arcade racer of all time the one, fleeting moment where driving in Ridge Racer wasn’t unwieldy or mind-numbingly effortless, but just crisp, responsive and dynamic. R4 is special for its high concepts, its visuals and its soundtrack - but Ridge Racer V is a better game to play. It was really hard not handing the No.1 spot to R4, but I’ll tell you why Ridge Racer V, the series’ PS2 debut, edged it here.

(To be fair, one of those packs brought Daytona USA’s Hornet, which is the finest DLC any game has or will ever receive.) To make matters worse, it’s not like it really tapped into the Vita’s power, running at 30 frames-per-second when even the PSP iterations achieved 60.

The game launched with three tracks and seven cars - yes, in 2011 - and made players fork over cash for the rest of the content as microtransactions. Unfortunately, in an act of stunning greed, Bandai Namco attempted to push a free-to-play model with Ridge Racer on Vita, despite the fact it still cost $US30 ($42) at retail. The concept of placing players in factions then pitting them against each other in team-based events was a novel way to promote online multiplayer at the time, too. The game gets a bit of a boost because it was on Sony’s final handheld that was simply too perfect for this world, and introduced fresh designs for some of the series’ classic nameplates like the Gnade Esperanza and Assoluto Promessa and Fatalita, that paid tribute to their original incarnations in Rage Racer and R4. Much of what’s true about Ridge Racer 6 applies to the most recent entry on our list, 2011’s Ridge Racer on the PlayStation Vita. At least this one’s still purchasable and playable on Xbox Series consoles, which counts for something. That wouldn’t be a massive deal if at least the driving was fun, but the series’ handling in the post-PS2 era is roundly flat and unengaging - the cars practically drift themselves. None of the world-building that made entries like R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 favourites among fans no currency to spend or upgrades to dole out on your garage. And although its track selection was fresh compared to Ridge Racers on PSP, the car roster wasn’t, and the single player campaign took the form of a thoughtless slog through endless events. As a launch title, it couldn’t match the technical showpiece for the Xbox 360 hardware that Project Gotham Racing 3 was. Ridge Racer 6 lands at the back of our ranking because it’s easily the least impressive showing of that second act. The declining relevance of arcade racers throughout the aughts probably had something to do with that. But after Ridge Racers on the PSP, Namco more or less repeatedly iterated upon the same formula until the end. The games of the before times each tended to be wildly different, with unique progression structures and gameplay. You can pretty much sum up Ridge Racer as a franchise into two eras: the games that came before the launch of the PSP, on the PS1 and PS2, and everything that came after.

Goro akechi meme