Doesnt the delay only apply to the US? Isn't the Euro release still on track for a March release? Aside from that im actually looking forward to this, no frills arcadey fun, yeah it will get its fair share of haters but as with all games, i never base my purchases on others opinions :)

Only this does not look like "Ridge Racer" it looks like Burnout crashed into Need for Speed.

Sad that such a classic series is being ruined.

Its also kind of offensive how they are taunting Ridge Racer fans with the flaming billboard. go to hell Bugbear. and burn.

racing games are a dying breed. Instead of handing this out to another developer, Namco should have frozen the series until the right time (PS4/Xbox 720 release)

I'm looking forward to this game, sadly it's released. I need my arcade racing fix! Come'on Namco Banda (or Criterion!)

Considering Bugbears track record, I'm waiting for a good arcade racer. Ridge Racer fanatics may cry as mucha as they want, but if the game is good, then it's good. Better still, all the Ridge Racers this gen have been very shallow, so this spin off might actually do some good for the franchises reputation that is practically dead.

No they could have just left it alone and made a new Ridge Racer on PlayStation 3 since there is really no point to putting that series on Xbox.

And this is an Arcade style Racing series with its own identity, there was never any damage modeling, cop chases, cartoon crashing into buildings crap, Ridge Racer, Rave Racer and Rage Racer were all about highest for its time possible graphics with pretty, original cars not related to some real world car maker, top speed, top challenge, etc the series could keep evolving/growing in that already established identity because honestly this is not a sim and its not SEGA's Daytona/SegaSuperGT type arcade racers where those did have damage modeling but for arcade fun.

Honestly I really don't believe this was really Namco's idea and Bugbear should have just kept at making their own game instead of creating hostility with long time console/arcade gamers, Bug Bear is basically imposing their opinion on what Ridge Racer should be and that is not Ridge Racer at all.

This is alot like someone trying to make Super Mario or Zelda franchise into a first person shooter with guns and blood. or like some developer making a Street Fighter game with gory fatalities and nudity, or someone taking a Halo game with Master Chief in it and putting him on PlayStation 3, I could go on. Its offensive, its insulting and its going to kill the franchise.

And sure there are some "supporters" but the funny thing with these guys is that the last true console Ridge Racer was released in 2000, in Ridge Racer V. The portable consoles have held on to the identity no problem but RR6 and RR7 suffered from being rushed launch titles, even though RR7 turned out great anyways, it could have been better if the series was left alone as a PlayStation game as its always been.

And this is not a PS3 versus Xbox thing, its just obvious the money hatting going on to try and get playstation games on Xbox instead of focusing on investing in growing their own IPs like Project Gotham Racing (WTH happened with that series did Xbox fans not buy it?)

Other than that I do agree that Namco should have blocked this travesty from being pressured on them and allowed their internal creative teams to handle their own games instead of other devs screwing things up.

PGR was very popular on the xbox it was when activision aquired bizzare creations things started to go down hill, blur was met with mixed reactions and as a result it didnt really sell very well which pretty much caused activision to liquidate bizzare creations just months after blur came out (that really pissed me off as i was hopping for the DC version of MSR (the first PGR) to come out as a DC classic with HD visuals only sega owns the rights to the name MSR while the game belonged to bizzare creations who no longer exist.

ahem ridge racer has also been on nintendo systems (N64,DS and 3DS) and on the iphone not just on the playstation also why should ridge racer just be kept as a playstation game (rave racer has never been released on a home console), if you think by keeping ridgeracer the same way its been for the past 20 years then you are clearly daft, dressing it up in new graphics but with the same old arcade handling is much worse than releasing it on different consoles or letting another game developer inject some fun which is clearly lacking from current ridge racer games.

The point is that PGR and Blur were on Xbox 360 years ago so if they did not sell enough copies to warrant funding a sequel, why convince Namco to take Ridge Racer and make it switch identity into a different genre?

Activision making the games fail is something I don't understand, did they sequels suck, did the Xbox 360 gamers just ignore those sequels or were they playing something else.

Also the whole MSR dreamcast version is kind of pointless, isn't Xbox 360 several orders of magnitude more powerfull and hosting a much larger installed base and isn't the Xbox 360 so ridiculously easy to make games for that they should have been printing super high end graphics a long time ago.

I bought MSR and I played PRG on X360, the graphics are hugely improved so if Xbox 360 gamers did not buy the sequels why expect them to buy MSR? it makes no sense.Ahem, Rave Racer was never reprogrammed to the PlayStation consoles for reasons only Namco knows like time and other stuff, they make other games too and for some stupid reason when the PS2 gen started game reviewers were being way too critical of "Arcade style racers" so perhaps thats why Namco made that game with the realistic licensed cars caving into the peer pressure of idiot game reviewers.

Ahem Ridge Racer 64 was a special agreement that game programmer graduates from Digipen basically went to Namco to try and make a Ridge Racer game on N64, as fans of RR they claimed in their opinion how great that would be and that is something of a problem.

You see its not like it was wrong of those fans from Digipen trying to bring that idea what is wrong is that they used their talents to remake someone else's creation instead of creating their own game.

Ridge Racer was always synonymous with PlayStation, after all it was Ridge Racer that proved Sega's incompetence during the Saturn days when instead of allowing their AM2 team the time they needed to fully reprogram (note how I do not use that nasty word "port") Daytona USA, Sega instead rushed them, like they did with a bunch of other Sega games to either meet the rushed launch in May 1995 or make a rushed holiday deadline like with Daytona CCE (and yes I own the Netlink Edition, the one you had to order from Sega direct that proved Saturn was fully capable but only if their devs were not rushed into meeting holiday deadlines.

And yes also on Dreamcast there was that idiotic idea of Bleem, of basically emulating PS1 games on Dreamcast, a stupid idea because it was Dreamcast games that needed to be played and created and funded.

Maybe thats what you are missing when I talk about Ridge Racer, the Xbox 360 audience already proved they did not care about that type of racer so why destroy it, turning it into a different genre and trying to shove it down people's faces instead of creating a new game or creating a new multiplatform racer without having to bastardize the Ridge Racer or any other racing game not created by the dev in question.

But the mentality of the Microsoft brass and related/partner companies is to take other franchises that became famous on another platform like PlayStation and put them on Xbox, why? why can't they allow game developers to take risks and make original IPs or their own IPs?

Why did they stop funding Artoon and other dev teams, Blinx was improving as a game and why not allow the internal development of new instead of capturing the old they did not create.

Also you miss my point on Ridge Racer games, they all are not the same, some tried different things but they always stayed true to the arcade experience, RRV did not play = to RR1 or RR4 did it?

But I also want to know just how popular PGR was on Xbox, how many copies sold? because I seem to remember a bunch of launch games getting 9+++s yet for some reason there was never a Kameo sequel, a Perfect Dark sequel... or even a Banjo Kazooie sequel of the current gen attempts.