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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.
Burnout 3: Takedown was my favorite. I had so much fun playing that game both solo and with my friends online. Burnout: Paradise never captured the same feeling for me, though.
For sim, I utilize iRacing to practice and learn tracks before real life amateur endurance races in champcar and lemons as well as track days.
IMO iRacing physics are so good and the tracks are so well modeled that it's a very effective learning tool. It's the first sim since Live For Speed that really feels close enough to real life for me to forget I'm playing a sim.
Plus traffic management and race craft are so crucially important in wheel to wheel racing & I simply don't get any other opportunity to practice those.
GRID: I absolutely loved the original Grid (I think it was called Racedriver: Grid in Europe) when it came out.
Project CARS 2 and Assetto Corsa Competizione: A while ago I tried using a PS5 controller on PC and using the gyroscope to steer left and right by tilting the controller. It works well enough when you get used to it. It gives you more granular control than an analog stick. You really can't tilt an analog stick 15 degrees consistently, but you can tilt the controller like that consistently. I'm not saying its as good as a racing wheel, but if you don't have one, it'll at least let you play games that might otherwise need a wheel. I played a decent amount of Project CARS 2 and Assetto Corsa Competizione that way.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a fun kart racing game. If you don't have a Switch and you want something like Mario Kart, you should pick it up. It isn't just a Mario Kart knockoff with Sega characters. Wait no... that's exactly what it is, but it's a good one.
Meta: [email protected] is a community here.
Assetto Corsa
F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.
Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is... mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.
I think Forza Motorsport 2 or 3. That was the peak of the series right there. I also enjoyed Dirt 3 and PGR4.
While I still ppayed all the later forza and GT games, they lacked a good campaign mode.
Anyone know which Gran Turismo has a good campaign?
Need for Speed Porsche to be honest. The campaign of going through the Porsche eras is iconic. Buying new cars and tuning them up is really fun and you really feel the difference between the cars.
Megarace 2
In terms of play time its probably Ridge racer type 4 for psx and the wipeout series followed by Mario kart.
Does wipeout count as racing?
Hell yes it does. Great games.
Mario Kart DS.
Shit’s a masterpiece.
I love me the PS2 era need for speed games.
Burnout 3 & revenge.
Dirt 2 has one of the best licensed soundtracks for a game, same for the OG Forza Horizon.
Modern ones, even horizon 4 and 5 feel very hollow compared to these in my opinion.
Super Woden GP 2 is an outlier to that though.
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
Moto racer 1 on PC.
NFS: Most Wanted as a Car Racing game.
BallistcNG as a Anti-Gravity Combat Racing game.
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.
I have been addicted to Burnout Legends (PSP title) almost since it came out, I kinda want to try other old school Burnout games.
Also I like Mario Kart 8 for Switch.
Sim drifting on Asetto Corsa is the only "racing" i do these days.
Playing Colin McRay rally on linux with wiimote + wheel frame as a controller was the best time I've had with rally games. Both game and controller worked better than I expected and was easy setup for living room couch.
Old crap now, but later sequels nor Dirt didn't give the same feel.
So, no one has mentioned any of these as far as I can tell.
The Crew Motorfest - sort of a competitor to Forza Horizon (FH is PCand Xbox only... The Crew is also on PS)... it's an open world ish always online style game. Some say it had better physics and closer to sim than simcade when compared to FH.... it worked better out of the box with my peripherals (wheel, pedals, shifter)... bonus: the prequel, The Crew 2 (which is a bit older and has a different setup) is $0.99 on basically all the platforms right now.
Dakar Desert rally - kinda rocky launch and might still be buggy... not sure on that front... but it's kind of an ambitious game that no one else was making. Basically driving offroad through the desert from GPS waypoint to GPS way point in a huge open environment (this is called "rally raid") in a variety of vehicles - cars, "cars" (really super trucks), big trucks (imagine racing a dump truck across the desert at whatever 120mph), motorcycles, side by side, atv. More simcade than sim in terms of driving feel. They,re not developing it anymore (in terms of new content... game breaking bugs probably get fixed) but there's a decent amount of content there... a little context that they kinda over promised to an extent and under delivered. Victim of the recent industry-wide layoffs for sure. So it got kinda panned. Definitely not the GOAT, but maybe worth it when on sale if it sounds at all interesting to you.
i am a diehard for old school SEGA sprite-scaling racers. OutRun, OutRunners, Super Hang-On, GP Rider, and Power Drift are all must-plays. they all run great in MAME and have also had a number of high-quality console ports. later polygonal titles like SEGA Rally and Hang-On GP are also great but will be less impactful if you're already used to modern racing games
i see a few comments mentioning different F-Zero games and would like to throw F-Zero 99's hat into the ring. the sheer chaos of that game is really something you have to experience for yourself
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!
I’d have to say an all time classic for me is Mario Kart, just so much good fun memories playing with my brothers.
Also Grid, and Grid 2. Just really deeply enjoyed both, played em a ton.
A final note would have to be the games that were part of the MX Unleashed series, just so much fun racing dirt bikes and doing all the awesome tricks.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 is my childhood game and I will always love it. I also like various other games from the NFS series, from the first one up to Carbon.
Not many newer racing games I like, but I do enjoy occasionally playing art of rally, Inertial Drift, Forza Horizon 4 and Wreckfest.
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?
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.
BeamNG.Drive and the Gran Turismo games