EA brings us Ridge Racer 6

There's no word on when, but Electronic Arts has predictably announced that Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360 will be another Namco game is co-publishes in Europe, much as it's done with stuff like We Love Katamari and Dead to Rights.

The press release, which span backwards into our electronic faces just a few moments ago, notes that Ridge 6 features more than 130 cars and 30 circuits, including eight special cars and "a classic mini-game on starting the game!" Ridge fans already know that Ridge Racer PSP does this – with Rally-X – but in this case our money's on Pac-Man. Ridge Racer PSP used Rally-X visuals in-game to illustrate the distance between leader and pack; Ridge Racer 6's Tokyo Game Show demo used the Pac. Saying that it's probably DigDug.

EA also alerts us to the World Explorer mode, which offers "more than 230 races for gamers to choose from according to their gaming style" as well as Xbox Live head-to-head races, worldwide time attack rankings and the chance to upload and download Ghost data.

We played Ridge Racer 6 at the Tokyo Game Show just the other week - where it looked bizarrely similar to the PSP version, except with higher resolution textures, shinier cars and lots more background objects. It was also a bit slow, but we expect that's not entirely representative.

Not that we care. You know what we're like about Ridge Racer games: it's all merry-go-rounds and inexplicable enthusiasm until something goes wrong. Hopefully we'll see that rewarded when the game pitches up, presumably around the time the Xbox 360 launches in Europe on December 2nd.