Sim, arcade, simcade, anything. I’m kinda disconnected from the genre and want to know what is considered the GOATs of racing games to try them out.
Me personally, I’d say Dirt Rally 2, very addicting gameplay.
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I really enjoy open world racing games. Forza horizon and the crew being two of my favourites.
Lego 2k Drive is a great one. Micro transactions are sadly pushed pretty hard, but I just played with my Switch in airplane mode and that made it pretty easy to ignore them
Art of Rally mixes fun arcadey accessibility with realistic handling for a fun stylish experience imo.
I love Dirt Rally 2. Oddly enough I’m not too good at it but it becomes a sort of groundhog day simulator as I continue to comically fuck up a run and reset to try and hit tight timing windows and optimize, resulting in a wave of excitement when it all culminates to eventually pushing me over the finish line
Super Tux Kart
Not a “racing” game but you can race in BeamNG (and even do multi-player with a mod.) After trying it, other games feel underwhelming to me.
I’m a huge fan of Burnout Paradise. The crash physics and cameras are so addicting that I’ll drive up and down the same street just flipping my car on its roof using the same split ramp just to see the carnage. The driving is a wonderful arcadey feel that makes insane turns easy to pull off, and the crashes make those insane turns addicting to completely fail.
Many people say the early Burnout games are better, but I’ve never played them and Paradise has remained entertaining for 17 years
I love Burnout Paradise. I used to load up the game and just drive aimlessly for hours.
Every time I hear Paradise City I see the loading screen, nostalgia for those early days with the 360 camera that gave you a drivers license. Good times and it still holds up, my gf had never played it and had a great time smashing barriers the other day.
Split/Second
Make Way
Mario Kart
I have a type.
I’d almost forgotten about split/second. That was a great game.
Ridge Racer Type 4 was a game that absolutely ooze with style in every aspect. The graphics were up there with the best of them at the time, cars ranged from simple to utter batshit in design and performance. UI both in and out of races is iconic, holding a motif that is both a racing aesthetic and minimal design, keeping the details only where they’re needed. The music moving from the 90s rave of the older games, over to house was a bold move but it works perfectly. It fits exactly how it needs with the course settings, gameplay and overall aesthetic.
Wip3out while the previous games may be more iconic due to the groundwork laid out by the Designers Republic. Even though they gave the series its icon graphic design style, the third game is the most definitive entry in the series (imo). It continues the design and refines that groundwork brought by tDR. The gameplay is fast and can be intense. Visually the graphics were incredible at the time with track designs that influenced the few later games with new elements and environments. The music was the perfect mix of future trance and techno that still lives in my head today.
I’ve been playing beam ng drive on my steam deck recently. Haven’t got any experience with other driving games but I’m having a lot of fun with it.
Dirt Rally 1 and 2 are both very fun.
Assetto Corsa is a fantastic simulator that me and my race team has used to learn a track before we take our race car there so we know all the turns. It really feels like you’re there and the game runs well and looks good low end hardware.
There a quite a few favourites over the years.
- Colin McRae Rally 2.0
- Live for Speed
- Hydrothunder
- Metropolis Street Racer
- Forza Motorsport 4
- Burnout 2
- Blur
- Wreckfest
- Gran Turismo 2
- Wave Race Blue Storm
- F-Zero X
- GRIP (and Rollcage 1 & 2)
- TT Isle of Man
- Dirt Rally 1 & 2
- Circuit Superstars
live for speed
It’s always nice to see it still being remembered. The first Sim racer I played.
Same.
I don’t play often but I check in every few months for an update or new mods.
Physics wise it still holds up. still some of the best tyre physics going today
Assetto Corsa
Need For Speed Underground 2 I would list as a solid GOAT for the genre of open world arcade racing.
I had to scroll way too far down to find this. The open world and vehicle customization were ahead of their time. Supposed to be a super upgraded fan mod for the PC port coming that makes it pretty for modern systems.
Gran Turismo and Forza. I love the simulation aspect, ain’t no way on Earth I want to drive a sports car. Too irresponsible.
Mario Kart for the social aspect.
Forza Horizon 5. Why 5? Because unlike 4, it doesn’t crash to desktop a lot… although 4 has more to do and a more interesting season system (the tropics has “seasons” but not the snow and scorch temprature swings like people in temperate latitudes are used to), 5 just has a bit more polish, and bold move with taking it to Mexico.
I also am watching the progression of Forza Motorsport 7, because the FM series is basically not-Gran-Turismo and I can play it on my gaming PC (no consoles here).
I used to be all about Gran Turismo back in the day, as well as the DiRT series and even Race Driver. Codemasters games, though, tended to be very arcadey. I need to get Dirt Rally 2, as I played a bit of 1 and it was pretty good.
I also remember Spintires and its spiritual successors Mudrunner and Snowrunner. Fun off-roading sandbox games with mud physics… because no offroading game has even attempted that in the level of detail ST/MR has. Also, the original publisher of ST is the worst, and they’ve broken the original game, just get Mudrunner or Snowrunner for a better experience.
Also, I am on the lookout for spacecraft racecraft games. I want to use my 4 axis stick for something other than Airbus landing challenges.
Also the 1-2 combination of Automation (car company simulator) and BeamNG.drive. You can build a car in Automation and export it to BeamNG to drive around in. Bonus props to BeamNG being the only car sim I know of that has decided to actually model the physics of an automatic transmission. This is something I wished other games like Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo would do, as a lot of modern cars are Automatic only and in every case they just turn the auto into a stick… and it’s terrible, as automatic gear ratios don’t work for manual transmission driving. If we can upgrade the transmission, then we can have a better incentive to replace the slushbox with a crashbox if it’s worth the upgrade, considering that torque converter transmissions are used in offroad racing due to having better resilience against the shock forces from bumps and jumps.
Shoutout to Live For Speed, the surprisingly detailed car racing sim by three bros that even takes clutch temperatures into account. Their latest updates added workshop-style modded cars into the game.
+1 for BeamNG.drive + Automation
Recreating production cars and racing them is fun.
Optimizing track cars for different locations is a LOT of fun. More power doesn’t always mean faster lap times - what matters is power to weight ratio, paired with getting the suspension, tires, brakes, and downforce just right.
The most fun build I’ve discovered so far is throwing a 2L, naturally aspirated V8 that makes 521 HP, into a Pontiac Fiero with racing slicks. The whole thing weighs just 1159 lbs, and can pull 3 G’s around corners.
I have really fond memories of the first Grid game from 2008. That’s alongside NFS: Most Wanted from around that time, like most people it seems, haha! I also spent an inordinate amount of time playing Gran Turismo 3: A-spec. I loved the career mode so much.
My favorite cars are the Lotus Espirit and Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR, to this day, because of Gran Turismo 3 and Most Wanted, respectively.
There haven’t been many recently that have piqued my interest, other than the gang all wanting to get Forza Horizon. I don’t play it much on my own, though.
If there were another track game where you work up from the bottom with a shit car in different classes of races, earning money and unlocking new parts and stuff along the way, I’d be into it. It seems most newer racing games just have generic “Engine Upgrade 1”-type options, or full-blown sim where you’re picking extremely particular individual pieces and tuning everything to an overwhelming degree.
