Quick Review: Riff Racer

One more entry in the Game Eulogies, this is turning into a yearly thing here. Okay, this one isn’t dead, but it might as well be.

Oh yeah - my copy defaults to French. Oh well!

Created by FOAM Entertainment and released on May 12th, 2016, Riff Racer is no longer available for purchase on Steam. Its concept, and the reason people loved it so much, was that it was like a more advanced version of Audiosurf. In both games, there are songs available from the get-go, and you could race on those for a high score, toggling difficulty to your liking. However, the big draw was that both games allowed you to upload your own music tracks, after which the game would procedurally create a stage based on your settings, with the song as basis and background.

I will give the game that; it looked really damn cool.

No no no!! I'm tailspinning! I'm going sideways!
Ironically, none of this, not even falling off the track,
is much of a step back.

Both games allowed; past tense. Audiosurf still does it, because it generates the game track client-side. Riff Racer used to do it server-side. As in, the server in FOAM Entertainment’s studios. Which means that, now that the game has been delisted and the servers shut down, well… you’re left with the inability to pick a track from your collection and turn it into a custom level. Unfortunately, that specific feature was the entire selling point FOAM Entertainment was counting on. Makes complete sense that they’d no longer sell the game, then – with that feature gone, what's the point. (A few games I’ve done Eulogies for should take notes and delist too. Damn things can still be bought even when they literally don’t work anymore.)

Excuse me while I stare at my collection of 3,000 songs that
will never be used here...

And, if you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know that I’m a big fan of music in general, I listen to a lot of stuff. And for years I would amass music, because I wanted it of course, but there was frequently that tiny voice at the back of my mind, “hey, when the time rolls around to review Riff Racer, I’ll have all those songs to try out, it’s gonna make for fun gameplay recording sessions, right?” Well, I got around to it too late then, didn’t I.

Which isn’t to say that fans of the game haven’t found some way to make it work, creating their own servers and giving detailed instructions to let anyone connect their copy of Riff Racer to those custom servers. Which, for some reason, makes track generation possible again. Although I commend the effort and ingenuity, I don’t think I’d feel enough interest going through that just to play on some tracks. I just don’t have the attachment to this one that others may have had. And I was too late to cultivate such an attachment, too.

You have a couple of carsd to choose from, and you could
earn in-game money to spend on... uh, stuff, I guess.
Doesn't really matter much anymore, does it.

Yeah, there’s no way I’m gonna play 20 hours of that one. I doubt there’s much point in telling you to buy it, but yeah – if you own it and haven’t touched it, and have no plans of touching it, you’re not missing out. Go back to Audiosurf (1 or 2) instead.