Submitted 2 months ago by abbotsbury@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
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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.
Amen, B3P perfected the formula, I wish I could mod it and bring it to PC and add more cars and tracks
The same team made Dangerous Driving and Danger Zone 1&2. The first is like the race mode of B3, and the second is like the crash simulator mode. Unfortunately, they are separate games, and neither are as polished nor do they have the good sound track.
Probably DiRT 2… Overall just did everything right for me, no complaints at all.
The absolute best arcade racer to me was always NFS Most Wanted 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.
Forza Horizon 4. I fricking love the British countryside!
Forza 3 was peak racing in my world. Forza 4 killed my interest in the genre.
BeamNG.Drive and the Gran Turismo games
Wreckfest, Absolute Drift, Art of Rally, BeamNG, New Star GP, F1 23, My Summer Car.
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
I don’t know if it counts, but for me it’s Distance
I generally hate racing games. The one I do remember playing a lot was 1990’s Stunts. It was an early polygonal game. You could make your own tracks. It’s was pretty ahead of its time.
Trackmania
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.
Diddy Kong Racing on N64. There’s no other that come close for me.
You can use either vehicle, hovercraft or plane.
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. 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.
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 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.
Mario Kart DS.
Shit’s a masterpiece.
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 (thisnis 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 not developing it anymore 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.
Sim drifting on Asetto Corsa is the only “racing” i do these days.
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.
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.
Wipeout 2048 was my favourite of all time and is available in the Wipeout Omega Collection. I wouldn’t say that it’s better than the more recent titles but it was just the one that grabbed me.
I also really liked:
2048 is so good. I love the teams each having three craft types. The tracks are really fun, with both wide sections where you can go flat out without a care, and narrow parts where you have to really thread the needle and use the airbrakes with total precision.
If you haven’t already, check out BallisticNG. It’s retro style re-implementation of the classic WipEout physics, and the upcoming update will fully implement the 2048 physics mode.
Wipeout is my favorite racing series. Jet Moto was pretty cool too.
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.
My all-time favorite was the first Test Drive Unlimited. Beautiful racing across Hawaii, absolutely no story lines which got in the way.
Project cars 3 in VR is pretty slick. I still think the gran Turismo franchise is tops. I wish there was a pc version or anything similar.
Mario Kart Series
Horizon Chase Turbo is also lit. High speed and rocking soundtrack.
I really enjoy Gran Turismo 7 even if it lacks a proper career mode and the AI isn’t good.
Looking forward to Asseto Corsa 2 as people were really happy with the first one and I haven’t played it.
Metropolis Street Racer / Project Gotham Racing.
“It’s not about how fast you drive, it’s how you drive fast.”
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.
GOAT: F-zero GX
Best kart: sonic and all stars racing transformed Best drifter: inertial drift Best arcade: track mania turbo Best Car Combat: Gas Guzzlers extreme
Had fun with the original Forza Horizon and Midnight Club L.A.
Midnight Club was my absolute jam back in the mid oughts, loved the shit out of that game. Kinda got away from the Arcade style racers, but that game has a special place for me.
store.steampowered.com/…/Death_Rally_Classic/
Free nowadays.
bestagon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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