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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Wreckfest, Absolute Drift, Art of Rally, BeamNG, New Star GP, F1 23, My Summer Car, Super Woden GP 2.
A bit more unorthodox than the normal recommendations maybe but truly excellent games. Except for F1 they are all quite cheap too.
Art of Rally
Need For Speed: Heat
Does bike racing count? If so: Descenders is amazing
And if that counts, how about Crumble?
Ooh: Turbo Golf Racing, and Kart Rider
Race the Sun?
Favourite racing game is always highly dependent on what I am looking for.
Forza Motorsport 4 (Not Horizon) was one of the best racing simcades i’ve enjoyed playing, it has solid sim-ish racing and it is very satisfying to build up a garage and take a car for a spin on some of the gorgeous original or real life racetracks. Unfortunately, it’s an xbox 360 exclusive and not backwards compatible on xbox one or series x, so not really playable on current systems. I am stll looking for a similar experience on a modern pc.
I also enjoy “Project Cars” and it’s sequel “Project Cars 2”. I can easily play the games on my current PC or the Steam Deck, but the game can be challenging on a gamepad - not impossible, but managable. It does lack some beautiful original tracks as it only features real life circuits and it does lack the satisfaction of having to “earn” and build up a collection of cars and making them your own. Unfortunately, both games have been delisted on storefronts and can no longer officially be purchased, but if you can get your hands on a PC Key, you can still enjoy the games on a modern system.
If I want to enjoy some sim racing, I’ll go with Assetto Corsa or Assetto Corsa Competizione. Great fun with a steering wheel, not really my thing with a gamepad. Modding possibilities for AC are basically endless on PC, but again, lacking some sort of progression system that will allow you to build up a car collection.
Forza Horizon 3 with its Hot-Wheels Expansion was probably my favourite open-world arcade racer, unfortunately it’s also delisted, and while I still have the physical xbox one version, that means I can’t play it on PC. Forza Horizon 4 (with the Lego expansion) is the next best thing (still far better than FH5) and is still available on PC, but will also be delisted in december (grab FH4 while you still can!)
I have also spent a lot of time playing Burnout Paradise, but I still prefer Burnout Revenge over it’s younger open-world brother.
Wreckfest is a great spiritual succesor to the already great Flatout 1/2 and certainly the best banger racer you can currently get. The damage model is very convicing and it’s good fun to wreck some CPU racers.
BLUR - an underrated battle racer, with a really fun 4 player splitscreen. Calling it “Mario Kart with real cars” is, imho a bit too simple, but it does get the point across quite well.
Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005) - early 2000s yellow/brown tinted aesthetics aside, the game still looks good today and police chases can go on forever. Great fun.
Not a racing game, but a honorable mention: American/Euro Truck Simulator 2, bought it as a joke back then, but it does feel cathartic at times.
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.
Diddy Kong Racing on N64. There’s no other that come close for me.
You can use either vehicle, hovercraft or plane. Depending on the tracks. Some tracks you can try using any of them. Some are vehicle specific.
You have somewhat open world for you to run around in any of those vehicles mentioned above.
Like in Mario Kart, instead of boxes for you to hit to get items. You hit balloons, and they’re all colored with specific usages. Like red is a rocket, blue is a boost, etc. However, if you hit same color balloon twice or thrice your item upgrade. Like 1 red balloon = 1 rocket, 2 red balloons = homing rocket, three red balloons = 30 rockets for you to spam away. If you hit two different balloons, newest balloon override over your last. There’s no blue shell bullshit in this game tho, that’s either positive or negative for some folks.
There’s mini games, one which I think is really underrated: Dino egg mini game , one where you have to grab egg, drop it in your nest and protect it until you hatch it. You can attack others and steal eggs. You need to hatch three to win the game. You have to find hidden key in one of racing track to unlock the mini game.
And you get to face the boss of each area, each boss has their unique mechanics. You face them 1v1.
Once you beat all tracks, you can do them again but with coin challenge where you gotta gather all coins and win the race. Some tracks are insane hard to point where you have to strategy which coins to take each laps and deal with other racers at the same time. And what’s the worse is the fact that other racers doesn’t care about coins. You have to get all coins and be in first place to clear the track.
Once you beat all coin challenges, you get to battle bosses again which are harder, then you unlock the final boss.
There’s also a tourney you gotta do in each area to unlock secret area with new tracks and harder final boss.
That’s it? Nope, you get to start all over again with the tracks flipped and other racers are harder. Then you gotta do bosses, coin challenges too.
And one final thing, prob one of hardest to do is time challenge. Beat that and you unlock final unlockable character. There’s two unlockable characters in the game.
Imagine that single cartridge of N64 got all of this, this could have been much more if Nintendo purchase Rare. I could never get into Mario Kart because of Diddy Kong Racing. Compared to DKR, Mario Kart on N64 is a joke to me.
I still play N64 from time to time, I love to replay Zelda games, banjo, etc and of course Diddy Kong Racing.
I really like DKR but I was never amazing at it. Especially the boss races. Killer soundtrack though. I listen to it more often than I play the game lol
In case you don’t know about it, there’s a cool site called Retro Achievements that has community-curated achievement sets for thousands of games (and leaderboards for specific tasks, like Mario 64’s Princess’ Secret Slide), and it integrates nicely with RetroArch and Dolphin (I haven’t looked into other emulators, but I’m sure there are other supported ones). It’s given me a great reason to play all my childhood games again, instead of playing them just to waste time.
Speaking of BK, I finished that set just last night and it was so satisfying. I’m sure you’d make short work of the DKR achievements!
That’s pretty cool. But I don’t play on emulator. I still got original N64 and like 30+ games from when I was a kid. It’s still going strong. Had to buy new controller tho.
Respect 👍 I still have all my old consoles and games from my childhood, all the way back to the NES. And I still collect classics that I didn’t grow up with. Hope you play yours on a good ol’ CRT :)
Sadly no, I gave away my 42" CRT away to buddy’s relative who was poor and I didn’t have any space.
It looks pretty bad in my 1080 ledtv. But even then, I still find myself replaying N64 games over and over.
You know, I have like bunch of games on my pc but I can’t get hooked on any of them like I do for old Zelda games. Altho I did get hooked on botw and totk. Maybe it’s Zelda games.
I need to find other Zelda-like games maybe. Any suggestions?
The only Zelda-like I can think of right now is Tunic. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s a great game. It’s on PC and all the major consoles. I’d say it’s more like the pre-N64 Zeldas than the open-world ones. Also has an in-game manual that’s 100% inspired by the manual that came with the first Zelda on NES. Incredibly charming game.
The absolute best arcade racer to me was always NFS Hot Pursuit 2 for PS2. The physics were so much fun and the cars were a curated selection of cool.
Always loved the Project Gotham Racing series, especially 3. Tons of fun to drift in those games. The Kudos system was definitely a unique feature.
Been playing through the Ridge Racer games most recently. Damn these are just fun to play.
Sega Rally Championship will always stand out as some of the best driving physics early on.
Art of Rally and Art of drift are hella fun “zen” games with a unique art style.
I was always a sucker for some of the cash-in Fast and Furious era car fad games. Juiced, Tokyo Extreme Racer (out before all of it) Street Racing Syndicate, NFS Underground, Midnight Club 3. They’re all fun but driving is always just ok.
My short list though: Gran Turismo 4 Forza Motorsport 4 or 6 (4 is less grindy I feel) NFS Most Wanted 2
*Absolute Drift
The only game I ever 100%ed
Also hold top 1% scores in every drift event. Love it.
I have a work-in-progress list here, strictly games I would consider “must play” in the genre. Notably missing the Ridge Racer and Tokyo Xtreme Racer games because I haven’t played enough of them to have an opinion.
https://howlongtobeat.com/user/atmur/lists/40754/Peak-Racing-Games
Mostly arcade and simcade racers though. If you’re interested in sims:
For modding, Assetto Corsa is basically the modern rFactor.
For offline racing, Automobilista and Raceroom have pretty solid AI. Note: Raceroom’s pricing model is dumb, kind of like iRacing just without the subscription.
For career mode, Project CARS 2 (not 3) is basically the only sim that even tries.
For online racing, ACC and iRacing are unmatched.
For rally, you’re already playing DR2. Richard Burns Rally is also shockingly good for its age.
I really liked the Tokyo Xtreme racer games. They are still probably the best car RPG games. I would love to see what someone could do now in the same vein. Even tokyo xtreme never got quite as crunchy or difficult as I would have liked.
I want to go so far as to be like a tactical survival style game, where you are out there earning a living wage from daily(nightly) car racing, and putting most of it back into your car. Just the repairs and maintenance alone being a bar you have to meet and beat every day on average to stay afloat, and then you can think about upgrades after.
It basically takes an environment like that for it to matter in a racing game that there are upgrades between the worst and the best. If trying to save up for even one good part wouldn’t be possible without at least some middle parts first.
Meanwhile, could have some “roguelite” elements too in driver experience/skill. The car is only half of what’s winning the races afterall. And even if you really blow it at some point and your car is fucked and you need to salvage and pull together what you got and go back to a cheaper car to maintain/repair, you’ll still have all the experience/skill your character personally gained helping it go a little smoother this time.
I would love to see what someone could do now in the same vein.
Genki is finally making a new TXR, got announced a few days ago.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2634950/Tokyo_Xtreme_Racer/
There’s also Night-Runners which is very much influenced by the TXR/Shutoko Battle games. It’s an in-development crowd funded game, so take from that what you will, but there’s a demo up on Steam as Night-Runners Prologue.
Ooh nice. I’ll take it. It may not be the dream, but it’s what you wake up to after dreaming, and that’s really all you can hope for.
I’m pretty sure a game as I described would only be a cult classic at best. Can’t expect that kind of passion project in our financial climate.
You just described my dream racing game ❤
Gonna have to dig around for one like that again
For online racing, ACC and iRacing are unmatched.
I contracted the iRacing sickness this year. The online is indeed unmatched but I’d argue the single player racing is also best in class.
The iRacing AI is actually fun to race against and nothing else comes close to the level of customization per-racer. You can build whole custom rosters with individual behaviors. If you’re so inclined you can even share all this stuff through communities like Trading Paints and Race Department.
iRacing is a hole with no bottom. Both time-wise and monetarily. Even to do AI-only you’re still paying the subscription and one-time content prices. It really is the best though.
These days I play a lot of Forza Horizon 4 and not much else, since I haven’t found anything else to really click. There’s a couple good ones out there though: Motor Town is pretty good as a car game in general, not just racing. Also BeamNg if you just wanna fuck around with the physics engine. Ooh, and Dakar Desert Rally is a fantastic rally raid simulation (albeit somewhat flawed)
Otherwise I would give some classics a shout: GRID the original, still holds up today. Also NFS Porsche, which was so ahead of its time it’s ridiculous.
Almost forgot: Driver San Francisco is a gem of a game, and Re-Volt, which is bound to get the remaster treatment any day now.
it’s highly replayable esp because of Steam Workshop modding support, it’s got excellent singleplayer campaigns, fun online multiplayer racing with friends and arcade modes, soundtracks that really gets the blood 🤌P U M P I N G🤌🔥
also works on Linux with no issues✨
Here’s also the 1.3 Electric Boogaloo Update
and 1.5 Kinetic Update🤗
I loved Driveclub back on PS4, think it’s delisted and possibly servers shut down, don’t remember.
Project Gotham Racing (I think 2 was my preferred one), Midnight Club II as well
Mario Kart series
Quantum Redshift on OG Xbox
- 4D Sports Driving (1990)
- Hi-Octane (1995)
- NFS: Most Wanted (2005)
- Flatout 2 (2008)
- Vector 36 (2017)
- Forza Horizon 5 (2021)
- BeamNG.drive (ongoing)
Any AG racing fans in here?
BalisticNG is my latest main game, but my love began with the WipEout series.
I also enjoy Redout and Redout 2, but the lack of weapons means I can only go so long before needing to play WipEout or BNG again.
Obligatory mention of !ballisticng@sopuli.xyz
Major fan hear. BallisticNG is such a love letter to WipEout, its fantastic
Redout 1 and 2 are great fun if I’m in the mood for lap times, but I hate racing against the NPCs.
TrackMania – I recommend Nations Forever if you’re starting out; it’s free and Nations was the “meta” environment (different environments have different physics) for a long time, so there’s a fuckton of custom content for it.
As for what it is: it’s like the racing genre’s Quake equivalent. It’s also like super hot wheels. And it’s like Mario Maker. You make all kinds of crazy tracks with it, like Mario Maker. The tracks feature all kinds of wall rides, half-pipes, jumps, loops, and so on, with nothing more than inertia holding you to the track; like hot wheels. And finally, like Quake (and Mario Maker), the high-level players are bat shit insane.
This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
All of that said, no pressure because you’re mainly racing yourself, even in multiplayer. You’re trying to get the best time on a track, and multiplayer is basically the same, except your time is being compared with everyone else’s. There isn’t even any vehicle collision (strangely, there’s an option for it, but it doesn’t seem to do anything).
Play TrackMania. Is fun.
Seconding Trackmania, though I’d recommend playing the latest one released in 2020 rather than Nations Forever. A year’s access to everything is $20 and you get tons of content to play.
For a game that is at its core can be played at the highest levels with just 4 buttons it is incredibly complex with an insane skill ceiling. I’m pretty good and the difference between me and the top players is absolutely insane. The game is a bit beginner unfriendly, mostly because you are going to suck against good players because there are tons of mechanics that the developer tells you nothing about and unless you watch a video you aren’t likely to understand why players are leaving you in the dust.
This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
The max speed is 999 km/h, which is only acheivable with speed drifting, but speed in excess of 800km/h are not uncommon to hit in certain kinds of tracks. Your statement about controls also isn’t correct, most of the top players play with controller, but there are some that are keyboard players, there is even a couple insane ones that play wheel (most notably Granady).
Huh, I was under the impression that high level players used keyboards and that gamepads were unusual. I was almost certain I’d read that keyboards were considered better because they were full-on/full-off instead of analog; the logic being that it let you respond faster. Where an analog stick would have some ramp-up time when you switch directions, a keyboard would register a full press the moment the key is pressed far enough to complete the circuit. Meanwhile, the physics of Nations were made with keyboards in mind, so analog controls wouldn’t offer that much of an improvement.
At least, I was sure that’s what I’d read.
Edit: that may have been before TrackMania 2, I’m not even sure if Nations supports analog controls. I haven’t played any of the games after Nations/United.
There are advantages and disadvantages to all the control schemes depending on the types of tracks you play, the surface you play, and the car/environment you play.
Most good players play with controller because there are many situations you run into where you want the precision of steering a specific amount around a corner, or you are playing a track where you want to either speed drift (SD) at a specific angle (e.g. fullspeed or higher speed dirt/grass/plastic) or want to keep your steering under a certain angle to no slide (e.g. low speed dirt/grass/plastic).
There are techniques such as neosliding where it is much easier to do them in keyboard as it requires multiple taps in quick succession. It is also easier to play keyboard when you need to make turns where timing of a full steer is important (e.g. ice).
Considering cars other than the stadium car you start getting into situations where one control scheme is far superior than others. The snow and rally environments require smooth steering so wheel is superior there, but controllers are a good middle ground. Desert is faster with tapping movements over smooth steering so keyboard is a bit better there. I recall canyon is a bit better with keyboard as well.
This all applies equally regardless of whether you are playing older or newer games, analog and digital controls are available in all the PC games.
I was curious enough that I looked into it a bit and it sounds like the difference is negligible at this point because they added keyboard binds for partial presses in response to analog keyboards(?). Again, I haven’t played TM2 or anything after, last game I played was TMUF/TMNF, so I haven’t tried using them myself, however when I was looking to see what the kb/controller/wheel split was I found a lot of people saying that there isn’t a strong reason to use one over the other anymore due to the new binds.
Edit: it actually makes me kinda happy to talk about this. I loved the games as a teenager, but they were too niche and I never had anyone to talk to about them.
Edit 2: damn, I remember finding the OG game at Fry’s and thinking it looked like the coolest game ever and getting confused when no one else thought it was sick as fuck (everyone was into Halo and CoD, and tbf, I was into them too; but I had patrician tastes that spanned multiple genres, not like the casuals I grew up around u.u)
Yeah they added “action keys” that can trigger different percentage presses (20-40-60-80-100%) as a “fix” because the bobsleigh blocks they added in the new game were not keyboard friendly and they wanted to even the playing field. They eventually changed the physics to get rid of that specific need (but not completely) but they are still useful in some situations.
Download the newest game! It has a free access tier which gets you access to the first 10 tracks of the quarterly campaign and to the ranked mode. It is a bit limited but enough to see if you might get back into it. There is a decent community on reddit for the game.
Growing up I’ve always been a keyboard racer. The only benefit i see from gamepad is that you can hold any angle while turning, even slight ones.
With keyboard every movement is timing and it’s easier to build muscle memory for me.
Edit: the reason I want a vr headset and racing wheel are the opposite of what keyboard gaming is
High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
It’s wild to me that some players like GranaDyy are actually able to compete using a racing wheel.
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
Forza Horizon 4 is my favourite, 5 is mostly meh.
Then we have Beamng, that is increadible
Speaking of Forza Horizon, they’re really cheap on Steam currently. FH4 is only 4 dollars.
FH4 is only 4 dollars
What country do you live in? For me it’s currently $/€14 in the regular version, 20 for the
deluxeultimate edition.Also note that the game will be getting delisted in december, so now might be the last chance to get it at a discount.
It’s 16 canuck bucks for me here. You must get some good pricing in your region.
Ah yeah, must be one of the rare cases where regional prices are really favorable.
Yep, but you can’t get all DLC any more, its absolutely worth it, still, but I just wanted to let people know
