Racing Retrospective: 10 memorable console racing games.

Mario Kart (N64) - I loved Super Mario Kart and spent countless hours battling friends in fierce matchups, and the Ghost Valley course with the risk-reward jump at the end is still one of my favorites. However, Mario Kart 64 is the one that has stood the test of time. It had a masterful level in Koopa Troopa Beach that had a similar do-or-die jump in it, in addition to deeper and better gameplay than the SNES classic. The lightning is OP as hell, and serves as the great equalizer. On several stages like Wario Stadium, D.K.'s Jungle Parkway, Royal Raceway, etc., a well-timed lightning can cause your opponent to not make a key jump. This always made for a hilarious game of chicken where we'd have to slam on the brakes before the jump hoping the other person would waste the lightning or not use the lightning hoping they'd slam on the brakes anyway. We've had so many swings and photo-finishes in this game over the years that it's arguably the greatest multiplayer game I've played. We still get together, grab some beers, and fire up this game every once in a while, and it's as fun as ever.

Gran Turismo 3 (PS2) - GT3 is among the greatest games of all-time. It looked phenomenal in its day, played well, and dwarfed any other offering in the genre with its car list, tracks, detail, etc. It was an absolute must-have on the PS2. This was the first game I ever 100% completed, and it took quite a feat. Those endurance races were ridiculous, and looking back on it now, so was the car prize system. After all, many of these cars had paint variants that could only be acquired by completing various events, so you had a 25% chance of even getting the car you wanted, plus a far lesser chance of getting it in the color you wanted. Didn't get it? Sorry, you have to do all that shit you just did again. And probably again after that. I distinctly recall rigging a rubber band system on the ol' Dualshock for the Super Speedway endurance race that actually worked. It was brilliant cheesing that assisted my completionist task. Going back and playing it now, the ability to wall-ride and the general stickiness of the handling makes it feel really dated, but this was a major leap forward for the genre, and it's one of the most complete racing games ever made.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 (PS2) - Hot Pursuit 2 was a chaotic, ridiculous game, and I loved it. It had police helicopters that would try to drop flaming barrels on you. I rest my case. It also featured some fun, slow-mo cinematics on big jumps, crashes, etc. Reminiscent of San Francisco Rush, there were some key shortcuts and alternate paths. The wanted level system was GTA-esque, starting with a simple car chase and escalating to roadblocks, spike strips, and the flaming barrels. It was dumb and great. I sadly somehow missed out on the 2010 Hot Pursuit game, which I think I would have enjoyed, but I've got fond memories of its predecessor, Hot Pursuit 2. Yes, the naming conventions on NFS games make zero sense. NFS III was subtitled Hot Pursuit, then there was this Hot Pursuit 2, then they made Hot Pursuit. (There are also two NFS games titled Most Wanted, which are wildly different games.) Suddenly, the Xbox One's name doesn't seem so silly. Dumb names aside, there have been a few really good Need for Speed games, with this arguably being my favorite.

Stuntman (PS2) - This is the hardest game I've ever played. You have to be virtually flawless, often having to overcome dodgy handling in the process. There are also portions where if you zip through a section, your timing is off and you fail. That's right; you can lose for driving too well. Stuntman is as frustrating as games get, made even moreso by the "director", which might be the best example of condescending asshole voice work ever in a game. To this day, the phrase "chase the tuk tuk" makes me physically uneasy. I shattered a PS2 controller out of sheer fury playing this game, and it's his fault. I know it seems like I'm to blame for spiking the controller into the ground with force enough to make the ABS plastic explode like a wine glass, but until you've attempted perfection on each level of this with that prick basically taunting you the whole time, you can't understand. It's not that hard to finish the game if you just pass the stunts on bare minimum, but it's truly a beating to perfect every scene. I consider Stuntman a significant milestone for me because it brute-forced patience and perseverance with its unforgiving gameplay. I literally flipped the unseen virtual director double birds when I 100%'ed this game.

Project Gotham Racing 2 (Xbox) - Unlike Stuntman, this was actually a really enjoyable game. It had good graphics for the time and tight, predictable controls (if a bit arcade-y). It brought back the Kudos system from the first game, which was basically a version of stringing tricks together a la Tony Hawk, SSX, et al. Using random E-brake slides to keep your kudos going made for some occasional hilarity. However, like Stuntman, it tested your patience. I remember the cone challenges well. Those damn things took the word challenge seriously, and for a guy who drives in cockpit view, having the tail of your car graze a cone to ruin some massive point streak was brutal. I loved it, though. It had some fun features that would help shape the genre in positive ways. The virtual showroom and kudos system would make it into later games in the PGR series and beyond. Much of what made this series great still lives on in the Forza Horizon games in particular, although I'd love to see cone challenges make a comeback.

Rallisport Challenge 2 (Xbox) - This game was so damn good. It was just solid in every respect. It was a looker, it played well, it featured the rally heavyweights, it had cool, exotic locales, and it allowed for in-car radio running off of your music that you had put on your Xbox. This feature is just now happening again in 2016 with Horizon 3, so it's fair to say that this game was ahead of its time. A standout for the game was the surfaces, which felt as they should. Ice racing was a gripless nightmare, you'd bog down if you slipped off onto the Australian outback's red dirt, rainy Great Britain cause you to slide into trees, etc. Rallisport Challenge 2 is fairly unappreciated and unknown, considering how great of a game it was. These were the pre-Forza days, and between RSC2 and PGR2, the Microsoft-published racing games were really coming into their own. It's also worth noting that this series was developed by EA DICE, which apparently created a slew of racing games in the late 90s prior to the Rallisport Challenge series. Fun facts.

Burnout: Revenge (Xbox 360) - Yes, before anyone asks, I played a great deal of Paradise and Takedown. I love both of those games, but Revenge is my favorite of the Burnout games because it took everything great about Takedown and put it on the Xbox 360 to look damn pretty in the process. (Paradise loses points in my book for ditching the crash events, which were all kinds of dumb fun.) The handling in Revenge was surprisingly varied for an arcade racing game, with cars that had a good sense of "weight" to them. The bigger vehicles felt appropriately floaty and tough, while the lighter cars were twitchy and shattered easily. I remember one burning lap in particular with an F1 car that took me forever to beat. The game already had a crazy sense of speed to it, but that race took it to another level. Blinking wasn't even an option, which I recall being a very real issue as someone who wears contacts. There were times I remember actually being half-glad I crashed so I could rub my eyes for a second. Great game, though.

Forza Motorsport 2 (Xbox 360) - I remember this being difficult. The original Forza introduced more realistic physics to the genre, but this iteration, with the precision of the 360 controller and AI that wasn't easily bullied like most racers of the era, made for one tough game. Maybe it was just me overstepping my ability by selecting "Hard" AI or struggling to adjust to one of the first really good console racing sims, but I hit a wall on this game in a big way. So much so that I mostly missed out on Forza 3 and 4, which are regarded as some of the series' better entries. I didn't dislike Forza 2 at all; in fact, I respected the hell out of it for putting me in my place and taking realism a step further. Unfortunately, it did scare me off a bit. I probably should have just lowered the difficulty and turned on a bunch of assists, but I had too much pride, and it resulted in a bruised ego of sorts. Still, it was a really good game that further solidified the series.

Need for Speed: Shift (Xbox 360) - Shift never seemed to really find an audience, as it was a bit late to the party on the sim racing subgenre, with most people firmly entrenched in team Gran Turismo or team Forza at this point. However, it really had some strong points. I've done a bit of real-life racing (illegally on streets and legally on track days), and no game I've played has better approximated the visceral nature of racing. Real racing isn't nearly as stable as most games make it seem; it's equal parts terrifying, exhilarating, and exhausting. Shift manages to replicate that fairly well using some subtle effects like blur, lean, camera shake, etc. Granted, other games have employed such things, but typically for aesthetic effect, not to actually simulate the kinds of disorienting things that really happen behind the wheel. This game is a must-play for anyone who likes to race in cockpit view.

Forza Horizon 2 (Xbox One) - This list wasn't really meant to be a top ten or anything (more as a timeline to reminisce on some of my history with racing games), but I saved the best for last here. Horizon 2, for me, is an amalgam of several games on this list. The numbered Forzas have a tendency to get a bit dry, so I find the Horizon games a welcome departure that capitalizes a bit better on the graphics, controls, and details by making things more arcadey and fun. It has a car prize system similar to GT3, the Kudos system from PGR, the exotic locales of Hot Pursuit 2, and some events/features structured like those in the Burnout series. This all makes for a great blueprint, but perhaps the most enjoyable part of Horizon 2 is the sheer joy of cruising around. I know damn near every inch of that map by now, and it's still fun to just fire up Horizon 2 and drive. Horizon 3 looks poised to take this a step further shortly, but the bar has been set really high.

I loved Stuntman so much even though it was so hard as you say. I remember those times you'd be getting far into a level and then suddenly not be able to do the early sequences you had down and get super frustrated. Times when you'd just nail a long part but then struggle to do it again for a long time. The occasional time you'd put together a long sequence and feel really badass doing so. When you would complete a level there was such a rush from that game. There were also some amazing sequences you'd do and I love that you were playing a car game that did a bit more than just be a race to the finish or shoot guys. It required a lot of you. I also beat the whole thing and remember the James Bond type movie being very hard because the car was just so fast. Really enjoyed that Tuk Tuk stuff, the Indiana Jones knockoff where you had to drive along collapsing pyramids and obelisks and get chased by Nazis, and the Dukes of Hazard type movie where you did stuff like a jump on and over a moving train, a lot.

That was a great game. I wonder if we will ever see another game like it. Seems like an idea someone could pick up again.

Takedown is my favorite Burnout but far. I actually really disliked Revenge just because the traffic checking was immediately such a turn off. It could have cool moments but to me Burnout is about dodging everything at really high speeds. That was my favorite part of Takedown. Coming to intersections in the city stages at high speed and navigating against the traffic. I also have had the "can't blink at all moments" in the series, especially with the Autobahn type level in Takedown where you would get going so fast, or when you'd pick some of the fastest cars in the game.

In college we had an N64 and would often play Beerio Kart where you have to finish a beer before you finish a race. Usually it just meant everyone chugs a beer as fast as possible and then starts but you could try other methods. I really haven't played much of any other Mario Kart so this one is my point of reference for the series.

Good post. Really excited for Horizon 3. I really haven't played a racer in a while since I'm less into the sim stuff. I have gotten back into GTA V since a friend I got back into games has still been obsessed with it and I love the driving in that game a lot. Mad Max is pretty fun at the moment, if yes repetitive as everyone said. The driving gets better. Horizon 3 looks very exciting though.

A good retrospective. I'm surprised at how few of these games I've played, mostly, I think, because I didn't play a ton of racing games in the (non-Dreamcast) 6th generation, and 5 of these are 6th gen games. My own list would be pretty different, adding entries like F-Zero (frankly any of them will do) and the first Gran Turismo (a graphical revelation at the time) and of course some Dreamcast hotness like Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 or Hydro Thunder.

I do agree about Forza Horizon 2, though. I think it's a kind of weirdly underrated game, and I think it has to do with the backlash against the Xbox One that was still ongoing when it released. I feel the same about Sunset Overdrive. Those were two of the best games of this generation, and yet they're kind of afterthoughts.

Hopefully Forza Horizon 3 is as good as the first two and gets its due. I don't know if it's my most anticipated game this holiday season, but it's definitely the one I'm most confident in.

@artisanbreads: The traffic checking stuff is part of why I like Revenge more than the others, especially Paradise. It solves a major problem in the series for me - going too fast to even dodge something that you can't even know will be there.

I doubt we get another game like Stuntman. Very few people were patient enough for that game back in '02. Fifteen years later, games have gotten a lot more "you're winner!" to where I highly doubt people would find enjoyment banging their head against the wall the way Stuntman expected you to. The Bond mission and the tuk tuk one on the rooftops tested me in many ways. Man, that handling was so twitchy. I enjoyed the Dukes of Hazzard and Indiana Jones ones, though. There was also a monster truck stunt show in between one of the movies that was truly awful. That damn monster truck was so awkward and flipped so easily in a weird display of anti-physics. I remember hating that one. I'm not even sure I really "enjoyed" Stuntman that much overall, but I damn sure enjoyed 100%-ing it, almost out of spite for it. It's the Dark Souls of driving games.

I have a great affinity for these games as well. Rallisport Challenge 2 was at that time the best racing I ever played. I spent a lot of time playing and enjoying that game.

Project Gotham Racing 2 was such a fantastic game. The locales and track layouts were just fantastic. I also love PGR3 and PGR4 which are fantastic.

Burnout: Revenge is my favorite of the series.

The Shift games were odd but I still really liked them!

If I had to pull up some other excellent racers from this era, the Moto GP games were always great. Colin McRae. F-Zero GX. Extreme G, Test Drive Unlimited, Pure, Midnight Club, Hydro Thunder, Splashdown, Sonic Racing, Episode 1 Podracer.

I get that line of thinking. For me that was always just part of Burnout that I was willing to take. Made it feel so dangerous.

@notnert427: I can understand why it wouldn't be popular, but maybe a game can eventually be made on a smaller scale that does what it was going for. I also feel like there has to be some ways to make it a bit more friendly and also still true to that idea.

Horizon 3 is both my most anticipated game and the one I'm most confident in. Even the "worst" Forza games have still been good, so I've got this one pre-ordered. We're in total agreement that Horizon 2 is underrated (as are most of the X1 exclusives and the console itself, sadly). I'm not typically one to complain about reviews, but there really isn't any noticeable weakness of any part of Horizon 2. Yet it got almost universally dinged for varying nitpicky bullshit. Some took points off for the game having environmental obstacles you could hit (yes, seriously). Others docked it because they just prefer non-open-world racers (uh, not really fair to punish it for not being something it's not trying to be). Even Jeff seemed to penalize it for being less enjoyable if you just rush through the main story (I still don't get how people potentially missing the entire point of the game qualifies as a criticism of the game itself). Most of the reviews had little to no meaningful complaints about the game and had a ton of positive things to say about it, then seemingly invented reasons to not score it that highly. I don't know if it was some lingering anti-X1 sentiments, a reticence to label a racing game exceptional, or what. Not to get all tinfoil hat; it just still doesn't add up. Moving on.

I had a buddy who was way into Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero. I enjoyed what little I played of it, and I recall him being really excited when he beat this one car he'd been struggling with for a long time. I don't recall it being all that difficult, but it seemed like it was his Stuntman. I struggled with expanding this post to include some old NES stuff like F-Zero and Roadblasters, but I felt like I would have done that era a bit of a disservice. I didn't really start embracing racing games until arcade stuff like Virtua Racing, Daytona USA, Ivan Ironman Stewart's Super Off-Road, and some 90s computer games like Indycar Racing, Monster Truck Madness, early NFS games, etc. Ultimately, I whittled it down to console racers I felt I was actually old enough to really appreciate, and in doing so, cut out some older stuff in the interest of focus and brevity. I might do another post later and throw it back to some of those games.

That level was the only time I've thrown a controller out of anger. A bit hyperbolic, but I've told people that I almost threw my TV out the window because of Stuntman. And I loved every minute of it. I loved the trailers that would play after you finished a movie shoot, I loved the crazy stunts you had to do, and the wonkiness of it. But GD, that monster truck level.

@notnert427: Well Forza Horizon 2 did have some legitimate flaws. For one thing the guy who guides your tour of pseudo-Europe is a real douche. For another I don't think it was well-structured. Win 25(?) championships and you...sort of kind of win the game, but keep repeating. I agree with you that that's not how the game is meant to be played, that it's an open world racer intended for lots of roaming around and exploring, but I don't think it does a great job of guiding you to that stuff. There are the billboards, and the challenges, but those are optional and charging money for fast travel means that (at first) you are disincentivized to drive far away from where your current championship is because you'll have to drive back, or spend money, to get back into the 'main' game. Eventually the money becomes trivial but towards the beginning when you're saving up for cars I think it was a bad decision.

That, and the fact that continuing through the championships unlocks stuff like garage finds and cool novelty races, means that you have to be intrinsically motivated to explore the parts of the game that are great, while the game seems to be guiding you towards mainlining the "story" which both is not really a story at all, and can get boring. This is bad for reviewers, who want to get the game finished so they can slap a score on it, and I think helps explain why it reviewed poorly.

I think the game would have been better off diversifying the things you could do to advance the game (get this number of skill points, complete this many challenges, etc...) and having no cost for fast traveling back to a place you'd already been.

These are minor gripes, of course, and don't really matter when compared to how freaking amazing the experience of playing the game is, from the driving model to the environments to the fun as hell challenges to the pretty good soundtrack. I think it's my favorite racing game, and the only one that comes close is Horizon 1, which had somewhat more varied environments, a better soundtrack, and, of course, the novelty factor.

But I think it does help explain (beyond XBONE backlash) why the game didn't review well. Reviewers are under time pressure and often do basically the minimum to complete a game. That's not what Forza Horizon 2 was about really. It was about grabbing a barn find and whipping down the Italian coast with classical music playing, or doing donuts in a vineyard and knocking down all the vines, or finding an out of the way bonus board and attempting the jump multiple times until you could nail it, or finding a cool challenge and testing your skill against it while the sun set against the horizon.

It's the opposite of those video games that fall apart if you try to drive off the carefully constructed path. Those are the times when FH2 really came alive.

In comparison Forza Horizon 1 was better if you stayed on the main 'path' of the game, with individual 'boss' races to go up against and its structure of advancing through divisions until the final showdown against the big bad of the game. Of course Horizon 2 had a final race as well, but it didn't have nearly the build up and, in my memory, wasn't nearly as cool.

Gotta agree with the Forza Horizon 2 love. Such a beautiful and fun driving experience. I still have some unfinished bucket lists that are kicking my ass. Can't really think of any serious flaws with it other than not being able to skip road trips and maybe hearing the same songs after a while, but that's due to the amount of time played. Can't wait to dive into Horizon 3 as it will be the first Horizon game I'll be picking up at launch.

Great post. I think you're on to something with the game not being particularly conducive to the way reviewers have to play games. To Jeff's credit, he basically acknowledged that in his review, but then weirdly seemed to penalize the game for it anyway. You're 100% correct about the game being at its best when you decided to just drive. I guess I had the luxury of playing the game how I wanted, and one of the first things I did was just go exploring and take it all in. It was an incredible experience that's up there among my all-time favorite gaming memories and basically paid for my X1 right then and there.

I don't really agree that the fast-travel was a big deal, though. I recall being able to unlock the free fast-travel relatively early on, and using fast-travel kinda misses the point of this game anyway. I never viewed driving across the map in Horizon 2 as some burden; I always had a great time just driving. Again, though, I guess I could see where this might be an early annoyance if you're trying to mainline the story as reviewers were. I just wish they would have separated themselves from that and considered that the game isn't intended to be played that way, and likely wasn't by most who bought it.

I really appreciate when games give me a sandbox and turn me loose. I loved Horizon 2 for it, and I love HITMAN for it. I've had enough of linear-ass games. I suppose they're much easier to review, but that doesn't mean games that don't follow that convention should be penalized for it. Doing Horizon 2 dirty over rushing through its main missions is like playing a HITMAN level by shooting the target in the head and running towards an exit, and then saying it was a lackluster level. That's....not a great representation of what the game has to offer.

FWIW, the game didn't really review poorly, just a good bit worse than its arguable quality. It was generally labeled a 80ish game, and it should probably be considered a 90-100 game. I know, opinions and all, but even the harshest criticisms were pretty damn trivial. Virtually all I can come up with is that yeah, the festival guy was a little douchey and the chick that calls you "dude" was mildly annoying, but both of them combined had precious little screen time. I just don't see where people found 15-20+ points to knock off. I'll stop complaining about this now. The bolded portion of your post above nails it far better than most of the reviews did.

I would like to throw TOCA Touring Cars 2 onto this list of games. A great racing game on PS1 and it even had co-op championship on split screen (so you and the second player could race for the same team in championship mode). Anybody else here played that game?

RALLISPORT CHALLENGE 2 IS PERFECT

To elaborate, many racing games are about expertly handling your car through clean driving lines. RC2 is about doing everything in your power to hold on to the tenuous thread of control you have over your car, on tracks that do everything they can to communicate to you, "CARS DO NOT BELONG HERE". I just love it.

@notnert427: If you have some track day experience & you enjoyed Shift you should check out Slight Mad Studios latest racing game, Project Cars, with a Vive. I was looking forward to finally being able to play Forza on PC but after playing racing games in VR it's really hard to go back, it really is the closest you can get to track days without being in a car.

Need For Speed Shift was definitely a better game than it got credit for. There were some cool ideas in it that I feel could work if introduced into the more serious games like Forza/GT. Shift's biggest issue was falling into that weird place in between hardcore sim racer and arcade game, a space similarly filled by Driveclub more recently.

Gran Turismo 3 and 4 were definitely the sweet spot for that series. I repeated the endurance races in both of those games over and over not for any particular in game benefit but because I absolutely loved playing those games and have always loved long races. It's a shame the series has gone steadily downhill since then.

As for the Burnout series Takedown was definitely my favourite but that may have been because at the time Revenge came around I had severely dropped off gaming so barely touched it. It's such a shame those games obviously didn't sell all that well with the different direction that team has gone under EA.

I am so, so with you on Stuntman. Oh, the fury.