All told, 2022 was a solid year for racing games. It gave us a return to dramatic circuit racing with
Grid Legends, the long-awaited (
if imperfect) comebacks of
Gran Turismo and
Need For Speed, the first F1 title to wear the EA Sports badge loud and proud, and old-school arcade vibes in the form of
Horizon Chase 2 and the expanded release of
Slipstream. It also inspired us to take a few strolls down memory lane and reacquaint ourselves with the worst the genre’s ever had to offer. Here in this list we’ve compiled snippets of all the games — new and old — we covered in the past year. Have at it, and happy racing into 2023!
Speedway Racing truly comes alive when you load up on 83 l of
Suonco race fuel and hit the asphalt. Lunacy is guaranteed. The artificial intelligence exhibits none; computer-controlled cars are also so incredibly slow in a straight line relative to you that they’re impossible to avoid. When you hit them, they fly into the air weightlessly. Even if you do your best to steer clear, they’ll still send each other into the stratosphere. It’s a regular occurrence to blow past AI cars stationary on the apron for no obvious reason; hell, half the time they’ll venture into the grass as soon as the green flag drops.
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While there’s little about the Driven To Glory plot that I feel like I’ll recall months from now, it does feel like the perfect narrative companion to the
Grid gameplay experience, which has always been one of chaos and bustle. You feel it most on the city circuits, where this game is truly at its best. The throngs of crowds lining the streets of Shanghai, Chicago and Barcelona; the dust kicked up as cars cascade into Turn 1 at Dubai; the warm glow of the lights strung over the track from building to building in Havana. The fireworks, the confetti, the balloons. God, the balloons. The artist responsible for designing the balloon archways in this game deserves a raise.
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GT7 is your youth in 4K, with ray tracing. It’s a remarkably earnest celebration of automotive history
and the gaming franchise that disseminated that history to the masses 25 years ago. A celebration so earnest, it’s sometimes awkward.
There are surely racing games that are more realistic than
GT7. Harder than
GT7. Ones that have even more cars and better music. Definitely better music. But there isn’t another racing game that will demand your patience like
GT7 does. For that, you might hate it, and I couldn’t really blame you.
Or, it might just remind you why you fell in love with cars in the first place.
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Slipstream has been out for a few years now, but only on PC, via Steam. It’s a fun, gorgeous tribute to Sega’s classic proto-3D Super Scaler racing games, like
Super Hang-On,
Power Drift,
Rad Mobile and, of course,
Out Run. The candy-coloured skies, endless palm trees and
nostalgia-swelling synth wave tunes are melded with a drift-centric handling model and a small selection of late-’80s and early-’90s performance cars, like the
Nissan Z32 and Lancia Delta Integrale.
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Racing games on the Game Boy Advance — it’s a pairing that sounds like a bad time. The GBA, beloved though it was with many fantastic titles in its library, was at its core a system designed to play 2D games. And driving a car is an experience that benefits greatly from a third dimension. It’s surprising so many publishers even bothered with the genre on the handheld at all and yet, my rough don’t-quote-me estimation is that there were about six times as many racing games released on the GBA than the Nintendo Switch has now. Why even talk about them?
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Last week, my friend José and I were playing the arcade classic
Crazy Taxi 2 on
Jalopnik’s weekly Thursday stream when we made a discovery that, quite frankly, stretches the limits of what’s deemed relevant content for a website ostensibly about cars. But it made our afternoons, and seemingly those of at least
two viewers. It’s about the
Sega Dreamcast and Y2K internet.
Hey, look at that — everyone’s gone! But
you’re still here, and for that you have my sincere gratitude. I knew I liked you.
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Annual sports releases like
F1 22 tend to be more iterative than revolutionary, and once again that’s the case here. That’s not to say there aren’t
areas Codemasters could look to improve, but it’s clear that with additions like the new broadcast options and dynamic difficulty, the studio is concentrating on broadening the interactive F1 experience to welcome newcomers without spurning longtime fans and sim racers.
F1 22 doesn’t look to surprise anyone who knows these games well, but it is shaping up to be the most adaptable instalment yet.
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Horizon Chase 2 feels like a victory lap for one of the few series keeping the flame of old-school racing games alive. It’s not massively different from its predecessor, in that it still apes the gameplay and general feel of sprite-scaling racers of the pre-polygonal era, like
Out Run,
Super Monaco GP and, most of all,
Top Gear.
The most profound difference is in the track design. Whereas the first
Horizon Chase focused on replicating the flat-plane perspective of racing on Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo with sparse 3D assets,
Horizon Chase 2 features richer, fully constructed 3D environments that bridge the gap between the series’ inspiration and the wave of titles that would follow, brought about by the likes of
Ridge Racer and
Daytona USA.
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I love racing games with a passion. I’ve been reviewing and obsessing over them for decades. While it’s fun to glorify all the greats – your
Gran Turismos and
your Forzas and your
Project Gothams – to really appreciate how far we’ve come, I think it’s important to sometimes look at the stars that shine a little less bright. Or, in this case, to occasionally gaze into the heart of a black hole so dark you may be driven to hang up your controllers forever.
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Little departures from the expected formula make
Unbound feel fresh — even if, at its core, this is in many ways the same game that got a lukewarm reception three years ago as
Need For Speed Heat.
Heat didn’t have the
graffiti-inspired art style, bangin’ soundtrack, focus on streetwear fashion and hip-hop culture or environmental diversity of
Unbound, but it had the same cop chases. The kind that alternately thrill you and make you want to tear your hair out.
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Honorable Mention: Racing (1/13/22)
It’s beautiful in its simplicity, isn’t it? In 2000, a company called Agetec published a PlayStation game simply titled
Racing as part of its budget A1 Games label. It’s absolutely as terrible as you’d expect, but the utter lack of any defining qualities whatsoever has endeared it to me for years.
I imagine its title screen in my mind’s eye — with a blurry Porsche 993 that may or may not be present in the game and the name superimposed in Times New Roman font — and I giggle. Sometimes even in public!
Read the full story…The post Revisiting The Racing Games We Played In 2022 appeared first on Kotaku Australia.
