Pimp My Ride PSP

How bad could it be?

So help me, I like the show. I like Xzibit's positivity, I like all the weird custom junk they do to the cars, and I like how excited and happy people get when they see their new whips. I also thought the best part of Midnight Club 3 and all the NFSU games was designing your car. Of course this game looks like a cheap license grab, but hey, how bad could it be?


What’s wrong with my PSP?

You can think of the graphics as a metaphor for the entire game; they barely work. It looks like Virtua Fighter 1 with a little texture mapping. You can tell that cars are cars and trees are trees, but that’s about it. Looking at the game will give you no pleasure, and it’s often difficult to tell exactly where you need to turn.


I liked Guitar Hero. Should I buy Pimp My Ride?

The first sign that something's amiss is that they don't let you start pimpin’ right away. First you have to “earn” cash, which you do by participating in PIMPIN events you’ve never heard of, like “Ghost Riding”. Ghost riding consists of getting prompted to press circle three or four times within 45 seconds and getting 12 hundred bucks for it. There are various little mini games for earning money, but they’re all variations of rhythm games that seem designed to challenge quadruple amputees. The best part about these mini-games is that there’s no way to tell which ones you’ve done, and no way out once you hit enter. “Have I done this one before? Yup. Looks like I’m doing it again!”

Salvador? Is that you?

Quick quiz: You are producing a driving game. Who do you hire to program the physics? A) Einstein B) Newton C) Stephen Hawking, or D) A surrealist painter from the 1930s. Well, it seems MTV chose D.

What do you do when you want to make a 3 point turn in a driving game? Usually you go in reverse and turn the wheel right, stop, then go forward and turn left. If you try that in this game, here’s what happens: You go in reverse and your car veers off in the direction opposite to what you intended. Then at some instant the game realizes its mistake and you whip around in the direction you did intend, but by this time you’re in a different position and don’t want to go there anymore. Then you throw it in gear, so obviously the car has to enter a state of quantum indeterminism until you hit 55 miles per hour at which point you regain the ability to (sort of) steer. That scenario takes place in an empty parking lot. If you try it in a street with obstacles, “Pimp my Ride” starts looking a lot like “Pinball on Ice Covered in Soap”.

Pimp my Crazy Taxi!

At last! The pimping of the ride! You can’t buy rims, bumpers, neon, muffler tips, etc to try to make your ride the pimpin’est. No. That would actually make sense, so it’s forbidden by the game. Instead you get two minutes to frantically drive around the city to all the custom shops to get parts. Remember what I said about the controls? Remember what I said about the graphics? This was me: “Hey, it says on my map there’s supposed to be a rim shop there, how do I get in? I can’t see. I'll just cut across this meridian here... uh oh, I just hit the magical invisible barrier that surrounds the grass. Okay, no problem, I’ll just turn around. (45 frustrating seconds later) Turn! I said Turn! TURN! YOU MISERABLE PIECE OF JUNK TURN!”

Okay, so you finally made it to the rim shop. Now you get to choose rims, right? No. There are just four rims. The first one is cheap and earns you one “pimp” star. The second one is slightly more expensive and earns you two “pimp” stars, and so on and so on. Since your job is to make your customer happy, there’s no real choice but to buy the most expensive set, and she’d better REALLY like those rims because you might barely make it to one more shop before the timer runs out. If you’re lucky.

So, how bad was it?

I’m strongly of the opinion that if a game loads up and does what it’s supposed to do, it should get at least five out of ten unless it belligerently goes out of its way to be poorly thought out. What should have been the driving part of the game was the worst rhythm game I’ve ever played, what should have been the pimping part was the worst driving game I’ve ever played, and there wasn’t actually any pimping part. I think that qualifies as being quite poorly thought out. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you have more fun writing the review for a game than you had playing the game itself, it deserves as low a score as you can feasibly give it. So without further ado:

1 point for not crashing the PSP

1/10