Nerding Day: Pimp My Ride for PSP (Patreon)

What’s up, everybody? It’s your 42-year-old divorced boy Mike reviewing a game based on the hottest show on television in 2006, which is the current year we’re in: Pimp My Ride.

By the way, how’s your 2006 been treating you? Good? It’s kind of amazing that we still get Christmas with grandma alive and lucid before the illness took over, right? That’s what I love about living in 2006. Yeah, it’s pretty cool here in 2006, even if we have to deal with (ugh) George W. Bush. Thank God we’ll never get someone worse than that guy! I reckon the world can’t get much weirder than this, so we better buckle up until it all smooths out for good.

But you’re not here about politics! You’re here because you love that immortal MTV and its ability to bring in millions of viewers now and, in all likelihood, forever. There is no end in sight to the MTV empire, and the workers yearn for their ride to be pimped. Ever since the first Model T rolled off the first assembly line and a buyer was like, “Oh, I know not, for soothe mine wife mustith approvest godly financial transactions and she was greatly unkind to mine buying of a parachute,” there has always been a seller saying, “Wouldst thoust close thine deal if thine trunk became stacked with the sickest gramophones that whatever we use as money now can buy?”

That’s all to say, the concept of pimping rides was long in the blood of our culture before the show Pimp My Ride brought it to the forefront, much like the show Six Feet Under did for dying or Cheers also did for dying. If you weren’t alive back then or you were in a coma and now your family can’t tell you that the Soviet Union fell or it might give you a big shock to the heart, this was a society that had long grappled with a disappointing lack of junk in the trunk of their cars. Sweet features like a soda machine that would make an extremely narrow slice of humanity impressed! To quote what Werner Herzog would say if I had the money to pay him to read this off a sheet, “The bareness of the American vehicle reflects the bareness of the American soul.”

If you’re not aware, Pimp My Ride is a show hosted by Xzibit (pronounced “Stephen”), that takes people whose vehicles are “busted” in the local parlance, and therefore as an act of great charity pimps their rides. Not in, like, a sexual way. Can you imagine? If we lived in an upside down world where a car would pull up to the curb and another car asks, “Do you like to party?” How did you conceptualize that in your head? Was the car picking up another car or was it trying to seduce a human? Would this totally change apps like Uber? Please write your answers in the blue book that’s been provided.

Regardless of how you imagined a sex worker car getting into a non-sentient car driven by a human while he takes her to an hourly motel that would fit all of the aforementioned characters, Pimp My Ride was a boost to the American spirit. The dream of having a bowling-themed car because you were a guy who liked bowling was finally achieved. Enjoy fish? Aquarium in your car. Love music? Speakers where your groceries would go if you had a family to buy them for.

The nation is now in love with taking old cars, the ones dismissed by society, and pimping them the fuck out, pimping them so hard they were nigh unrecognizable, pimping them so throughly that the Ship of Theseus would weep. From where we stand in 2006, the world cannot get better and will never get worse.

Of course, not everyone has the ability to get their car pimped. Not everyone is related to the show’s producers. Some people might not have enough money to turn their small family sedan into a miniature club with fuzzy seats and strobe lights and coolers for cocktails. Others, such as farmers, often have vehicles that can’t be pimped due to their inherent utility. And children? Don’t even get me started there: They don’t have cars at all! And would you even want to pimp a child’s car? Even writing that feels strange.

Which brings us to the game that finally extends the fun of pimping rides to the common folks: Pimp My Ride for the PlayStation Portable. I specifically chose to highlight this version because, theoretically, you could pimp your car to be a car-pimping mobile and then pimp cars within your car that was pimped to pimp other cars. Third base!

Lucky for us, Pimp My Ride for PSP is an example of a game that checks every box you might have on your sheet if you want a physics-free driving simulator in which you have to do broken rhythm games to make enough money to convince a cheap lady to let you compete to fix her car. It achieves what only the best games even reach for: Total verisimilitude. The exact experience, but mirrored. We, as players, also become the creators. The signifier becomes the signified. We both become the ride pimper and the ride pimpee.

In this way, Pimp My Ride for PSP takes the entire human experience and distills it down to one small proprietary disc. To learn more, please join me. Come along and ride on this fantastic voyage, slide, slide, slippity-slide, I’m hitting PSP buttons on the block in a shirt my mom got me.

The PlayStation Portable is a pretty powerful system for taking games on the go! The fact that we have full Grand Theft Auto games on there is crazy! In the current year, which is 2006, developers are using every trick in the book to make their portable games look just as good as they do on a PlayStation 2. And that’s a modern system!

Which is why it’s refreshing to see Pimp My Ride keep it casual. Rather than lowering the frame rate by trying to fill the screen with as many cars and buildings as possible, the developers keep the frame rate low despite there not being many cars and buildings ever on screen at all. They take out the middle man. Let it run bad on its own without needing to make the system get hot or something.

Rather than forcing players to look at graphical settings, it kind of just decides when lighting is going to get weird or a character’s limbs aren’t entirely connected to their body correctly. If anything, it leans into the metaphor of the show itself: Sometimes something that looks bad can have a little more under the hood than you expect. And, also with the show, that usually necessitates replacing absolutely everything.

As a show, Pimp My Ride focuses on creating intricate, novel modifications for cars. We learn more about the driver, their background, and the producers come up with a fun way to give them their dream car. Whether it’s animals, music, or having really shitty taste, Pimp My Ride allowed average Americans to express themselves in a way only the richest pieces of shit had managed in the past. But this is 2006, baby! We’re living in the era when everyone’s rich and that’s not ever going to change. Green arrow up to infinity!

While most of Pimp My Ride the show took place in Southern California around Los Angeles, the game is situated in a town named “Pimp City,” with students going to colleges such as PCU. This is not a real city, of course, but rather one based on where people imagine your mom is from.

To avoid just making this a game about creative, fun car customization, Pimp My Ride takes a page from genres like racing, rhythm, and tycoon. And I do mean a page from each because I’m relatively sure the design document for this game was three pages max. But it’s that simplicity that makes the game great. Pimp My Ride strips away common video game distractions like physics and map consistency and a gameplay loop that makes logical sense even in an abstracted sort of way.

First we have to earn enough money to be allowed to even compete to pimp a car. That’s right, we’ve got pimping competition in Pimp City and they are ready to out pimp you! Missions start by meeting a character who needs their car upgrades (i.e., “pimped”). We learn a little information about them that doesn’t matter, so don’t worry if you’re not listening. Their job and their lives are as irrelevant as yours. But we’ll find out just how terribly, awfully, no-good-very-badly trashed their car is!

To earn money to fix the cars, you simply drive around doing quests such as crashing into other cars, performing a minor rhythm game, picking up over two different kinds of tokens, and that’s it. Don’t worry - you’ll get good at this fast because it doesn’t change from mission to mission, even as the map does. Oh, the map doesn’t get bigger! It just sorta shifts around a little, like you’re depressed and want to shop without leaving the neighborhood.

Driving is probably the biggest part of the game. So if you’ve played Grand Theft Auto before, you’ll know what you’re getting here: not Grand Theft Auto. You can’t leave the car, and the only vehicles you can drive are the ones you’ve already pimped. Then again, Pimp My Ride the show is about community and love, so I supposed this works as a bit of an anti-GTA. You’re only driving cars you’ve got the right to drive. You’re a good person. You are. Look in the mirror and say it. Fucking do it. Say the words. Why can’t you face yourself? What do you know that you won’t even tell yourself, you fucking lazy piece of shit?

Meanwhile, the rhythm sections come in a few forms. Sometimes you’re simply driving by a crowd of people who are gawking at you as you input a quick series of buttons to make them cheer and I guess give you free cash? Sometimes you’re dancing next to your car with a longer rhythm game that is a bit too choosy on the button accuracy for something with this budget. The better you perform in these tasks, the easier it is to earn money. The easier it is to earn money, the easier it is to try to convince them to let you pimp their car.

You see, once you’ve got enough money, then you’ve got to drive around the map to different mechanics that each individually have something you need: New paint, better wheels, a giant sewing machine, etc. You only have two minutes to do this because, as we all know, the best way to spruce up a car is to drive at top speed down narrow streets in which even the slightest barriers and curbs are made of invisible, ten-foot-tall concrete walls.

While this is happening, your “rival,” who I don’t know and can’t see, is also pimping an identical car. How does our beneficiary have two equally shitty cars at once? I dunno. How do any of us get trapped in a hell of our own making? How many of us have had a failed relationship, thought, “No, I’m not doing that again,” and then make the same mistake that we made with Joline? Even though she took us back and then we made it again? So I don’t fault the game for assuming a seamstress would have two equally broken pickup trucks.

If, at the end of two minutes, you have pimped a better ride than your rival, the character will choose you and you win! If they don’t, your entire family line going forward and backward three generations are wiped out.

And then the loop continues! More sections of the map unlock, other sections of the map lock, and you search for more money to fix more cars for more ungrateful people. This, too, mimics the human experience.

Did you know Pimp My Ride star Xzibit was also a musician? You assumed it, I know, but why did you assume it? Did you know already? Or did you see an MTV guy hosting a car show and you’re like, “Hmmm… probably a rapper”? You should think about how you present yourself more because everyone here notices. You’re not being cute. You’re not being clever. We know what the fuck you’re doing.

Fortunately for you, Xzibit’s music is in this game. There are at least three songs, and all of them are 100% definitely a series of words and musical notes saved as an audio file. One of Xzibit’s most important songs describes a need for a conversation between “the black and brown,” which was touching during my mission finding $8,000 to fix up a white guy’s seemingly-fine van. We all make assumptions, I guess. I’m no more or less innocent than the next guy.

There isn’t much music to offer, but every single song is important. And while there aren’t many sound effects, you’re going to fall in love with noises like “crunch,” “bumper slammed into a wall,” “jet engine that would never fit in this car,” “cartoon coin chime,” and “other crunch.” Playing this game with headphones is a must because others might try to stop you if they could hear what you were doing and knew of your sins.

Pimp My Ride for the PlayStation Portable is the best of all worlds because all worlds contain pain and suffering. It’s a driving game in which your car will bump a pole and then fly backwards half a mile. It’s a tycoon game in which the money you spend and the quality of what you produce basically doesn’t matter. It’s a game hosted by a musician featuring rhythm sections that only work if you press buttons slightly off beat.

It’s perfect. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Because, as I’ve said, Pimp My Ride is a metaphor for the cars that the show fixes. It’s broken, but perhaps with a little love someday, somehow, a musician who’s desperate for a second career after a failed sophomore album will come by, pimp out this game, and give us something truly wonderful.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared MountainMan, the pimpest pimp to ghost ride the whip this side of the mississippi. Nobody did it better, and nobody ever will.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM