Ridge Racer 3D: Flex Nitrous

I bet you didn't think you'd see a post about THIS game again.  Because I'm able to StreetPass myself, I can constantly send myself laps to beat, and thus I've been playing around with things while unlocking the rest of the vehicles and nitrous options for each vehicle.

I'd been using the Hi-Nitrous with the Kamata RC410.  The car is so well suited for the high-speed tracks with fewer drifting opportunities, that I needed to be able to fill nitrous tanks on those tracks to actually be able to use nitrous at all.  Since the Hi-Nitrous charges faster than normal, that seemed like the go-to option.  Before that, I was using Auto-Nitrous, which, as the name might suggest, automatically fills nitrous tanks.  Unfortunately, it does so too slowly for my tastes.

Flex Nitrous had always been sitting there, as one of the options I unlocked just to have everything unlocked, but otherwise ignored.  Until now.

What does Flex Nitrous do anyway?  Well, instead of having multiple nitrous tanks that you can fill up and discharge with the press of a button, you just get one nitrous tank.  One really big nitrous tank.  Instead of the usual "press button, nitrous discharges until tank empties, keep car under control in the meantime" thing with the other nitrous options, this one is more like "hold down buttan to go faster".  Any time you have any nitrous at all, you can just hold the button to use it.  Hold it down long enough and it goes to double nitrous, granting you even more speed.

This makes getting Ultimate Charges ridiculously easy.  Just nitrous down a straight, and release it when starting your drift.  The rhythm you'll need to get into is basically that.  Nitrous down straights, drift the corners to get more nitrous, repeat.  You end up with so much more of the track being viable for using Nitrous when you can use however much of it you want at a time.  This leads to faster lap times.

I was having trouble beating my ghosts on a regular basis until I switched to Flex Nitrous.  Well, one of them, anyway, as the one on the more curvy of the two tracks doesn't really use Hi-Nitrous very well and I was stomping it even with Hi-Nitrous, just by using nitrous more intelligently.  Now the only reason I ever lose to the other ghost is if I fuck up and get a bad start.

Flex Nitrous certainly isn't for everyone.  It takes a lot of good timing, finesse, and perseverance to get the most out of it. You can certainly do really well with Hi-Nitrous or any of the other options.  But if you're looking to eek out those last few hundredths of a second for the perfect lap, try Flex Nitrous, and discover there may actually be a few more seconds you can save.