RPGs: Stop Making Bad First Impressions 
Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Namco’s Ridge Racer series is turning 18 years old in 2011. What will it do with its new adult freedoms? Get a new developer and what appears to be plenty of destruction, as seen in the new Ridge Racer Unbounded.
Namco Bandai has thrown its support behind Nintendo’s new 3DS, with five games currently in development for the handheld. One of them is, of course, Ridge Racer.
Namco Bandai is taking the old Ridge Racer franchise for another spin, its first in three years, this time on the visual powerhouse that is… Apple’s iPhone? Yes, it’s an iPhone game.
Yeah, you read that right. Ridge Racer. Pachislot machine. Together. In two flavours: one on the PS2, the other, a real life pachislot machine (sort of like a slot machine mixed with a pachinko machine that dishes out tokens) with tacky LCD speedometer. Good news is this is real. Bad news is there’s no way in hell this is ever going outside Japan. Well, except for maybe the PS2 version, which will be out on June 5. Above’s a screen from the console edition, full-body pic of the pachislot machine’s after the jump.
Over on Gamasutra, designer Ernest Adams has posted an interesting piece on video game software patents. He argues that not only are such patents morally gray, but that they are too encompassing—citing an example from Namco’s PSOne version of Ridge Racer in which they patented, we kid you not, load-time minigames. He explains: The US Patent and Trademark Office has taken a much more vague approach to determining what may or may not be patented. Its guidelines for patent examiners requires that the invention produce a concrete, useful, and tangible result, and gameplay patents are being allowed.
Then he later continues:
Testing of a 3D version of Ridge Racer 7 at Namco’s Wonderpark HeroesBase in Kawasaki City. The 3D used in the PS3 racing title was developed by NHK and supposedly does not make one’s eyes tired. Called “Xpol,” two images are processed for each eye by blending the scanning lines on LCD TVs. Since images are made from polygons, they are relatively easy to convert to 3D, since the only changes need to be so that base image displays for each eye. According to Game Watch Impress, frame rates have slipped slightly. Free location test runs until the 14th of this month. Hey, that’s tomorrow!
