Drifting to the Finish

Before I begin to wax about what makes a great racing video game, I’ll state the obvious problems with real driving. First is that driving (within the law) in life is dreadfully boring. Speed limits to obey, cops to watch out for, rules, regulations, and puny little Geo Metros to drive around town in while trying to conserve gas at all costs. The sad truth is that everyday driving is simply a non-glamorous event. There is no re-loading at the previous mile marker if you get pulled over and arrested for that parking ticket you didn’t pay.

The second reason driving in real life is no fun is because cost. For even the most boring, tan 4-door sedan, it will tally up to about $20,000 when it is all said and done. After feeling like you just got robbed, the new car doesn’t like to stay in tip top shape without constant attention. Gas needs to be filled, oil has to be changed, and expensive repair bills should get paid. When one thing breaks on a car, it starts a chain reaction that nuclear scientists should study because even a broken light one week could spell doom for your transmission in a few weeks. Any car owner can attest to that.

So why do people buy cars to begin with? If it wasn’t for those pesky jobs and if research for teleporters would hurry up, we wouldn’t need them. However, there is a way to spice up day-to-day driving as well as cut the cost of owning a car down to a fraction of the cost. That magic way would be to thrown down the cash on the latest racing video game. Racing games have it all going for them; you get to have a sensation of speed as well as drive the hottest cars to hit the highways for a MRSP of $59.99. Talk about a sweet deal.

Racing games have been around gaming for a long time; Pole Position is probably the oldest recognizable title for the Atari 2600. In 2006, we get Need for Speed: Carbon. To say the least, things have change quite a bit since the pre-8-bit revolution. It is not my goal to lecture with a history lesson of how racing games evolved and blossomed into a beautiful lotus flower over the years, so we’ll leave it at that. The goal is to define what makes a racing game fun and enjoyable. Luckily, I happen to carry around a list of such subject matter.

The Top Ten List of What Makes a Great Racing Game:

10. Challenging race tracks
9. Vast selection of cars
8. More than one gameplay mode
7. Appeal to even the worst “Sunday Driver”
6. Have challenging opponents
5. Rewards for driving well
4. Spectacular crashes
3. Customization
2. Sense of speed
1. That ever elusive “fun factor”

There are many racing games that might have a handful of those qualities but there are very few that have them all. For instance, Burnout has spectacular crashes, sense of speed, and fun factor but lacks customization. Other games, like Need for Speed: Carbon offer all of those traits and go above and beyond that. For the sake for this editorial, the racing games with a car lot full of options will be called the premium titles. Premium titles have many different aspects of what makes racing games fun incorporated in many different ways.

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Take Autosculpting mode in Carbon, for instance, where customization is taken to stratospheric heights and each aspect of the car can be molded and bent into any shape or size. On top of that, vector based vinyls are used to further customize the look of any fully licensed car. Quoting Carl Sagan, there are “Billions and billions” of ways your car can look. Granted that the difference might come down to how low you have chopped the top but none the less, it can make all the difference for fickle car connoisseurs. Customization isn’t generally thought of as part of the actual gameplay but I personally know people who spend hours just making the car in their image. So in that respect, it could be considered a crucial part of gameplay because how the game plays from the customization sets the tone for how much the gamer feels attached to the rest of the game. I know that is the case for me and even if there is something that makes me think the game revolves around me, I have a much better time through out the game.

Different modes of racing are what lead to diverse gameplay that doesn’t get stale, boring, or repetitive. Having reviewed many games in my time, if those words make it into a review, the end result isn’t going to be rosy. Need for Speed games have rarely had this problem because of the different forms of racing within the game. Drifting, street, and canyon racing will offer everyone a chance to race in a different manner than just selecting circuit races from a menu for 10 hours. The one caveat is that if the gameplay isn’t fun to begin with, then no matter how many modes are thrown in a racing game, it just won’t be, well, fun. That goes for video games as an industry but I just felt like that needed to be said.

The racing genre is as diverse as the action genre. There are so many sub-categories that it makes my head swim. There are kart, street, sim, and arcade racing games, just to name a few. That list I provided offers a wide area where any racing game should be judged. Racing games like Need for Speed and Gran Turismo, while both different kinds of games, offer a great racing experience all around and shouldn’t be missed by anyone.