Tag Archives: driving games

Fatal Rewind

Formula 1 97: Racing, Refined

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This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
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A year after the well-received Formula 1 hit the PlayStation, Bizarre Creations proved that their apparent skill in creating great racing games wasn’t just a fluke — because they made another Formula One game, and it was even better.

Formula 1 97 hit store shelves in September of 1997, a month before the 1997 racing season came to a close. While development ran fairly smoothly — and apparently legendary commentator Murray Walker was so impressed with the game that he signed an exclusive agreement with Sony to provide commentary for another two years — Psygnosis and Sony ran into legal issues with the sport’s various governing bodies after the game launched, and ended up having to repackage, rename and rerelease the game.

Thankfully none of that matters now, and Formula 1 97 still provides an enjoyable racing experience for both arcade racer fans and more dedicated petrolheads. So let’s take a closer look!

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Fatal Rewind

Formula 1: Bizarre Creations’ True Beginning

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This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
< Previous | Contents | Next >

So far here on Fatal Rewind: A Bizarre Creations Retrospective, we’ve seen how Martyn Chudley and, subsequently, a team of able assistants, commanded a solid technical mastery over the hardware they were working on, producing beautiful looking games that played well.

Today, we reach a significant milestone in the history of the company and their games, because it marks the point at which Chudley and his team became Bizarre Creations, the name under which they worked up until their untimely demise in 2011.

It also marks the first time they worked on a type of game that would come to be seen as their particular specialism: the accessible but realistic racing game, straddling the line between arcade game and simulation. Let’s look at Formula 1, released for PlayStation in 1996.

Continue reading Formula 1: Bizarre Creations’ True Beginning →

Dreamcast, Racers

Tokyo Highway Challenge: Around and Around and Around

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The racing game genre is one area of gaming where, outside of graphical and performance improvements, I suspect it’s always felt quite difficult to innovate.

After all, the fundamental concept of “two or more things moving in the same direction at high speed, with one attempting to get somewhere before the other one in order to receive some sort of reward” has been around pretty much as long as human civilisation. So what else can you do with that?

Well, says Tokyo Highway Challenge (aka Tokyo Xtreme Racer, aka Shutokou Battle) for Sega Dreamcast, why not rethink the fundamental means through which a winner is decided? Let’s take a closer look at how that works.

Continue reading Tokyo Highway Challenge: Around and Around and Around →

Evercade, Piko Interactive Collection 1, Racers, SNES

Top Racer: Definitely-Not-Lotus Turbo Challenge

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Racing games used to be very different to how we know them today — primarily due to the limitations of the hardware on which they were running.

Instead of unfolding in lovingly rendered, minutely detailed 3D polygonal worlds as most of today’s racers are, they took what we now call a “vanishing point” approach, where the road was drawn using two converging lines to simulate a sense of perspective, and sprites drawn at various sizes were placed along the sides of the track to assist with the illusion of movement and speed.

Of all the racers designed in this way — and there are many, including some developed quite recently! — Kemco’s Top Racer, also known as Top Gear, is one of the finest out there. This is a game that still gets regular play from a lot of racing enthusiasts today — plus now you can enjoy it as part of the Piko Interactive Collection 1 cartridge for Blaze’s Evercade retro gaming system. So let’s take a closer look!

Continue reading Top Racer: Definitely-Not-Lotus Turbo Challenge →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off-Road

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Before 3D became particularly widespread, there were quite a few top-down racing games in the arcades. And this perspective made them ideal for multiplayer competition.

A relatively late entry to this subgenre of arcade racing was Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off-Road, rebranded to simply Super Off-Road on subsequent re-releases due to licensing shenanigans. This got an extremely solid Atari ST port by Graftgold, who were well-known for their good work on a variety of platforms.

It’s definitely a challenge, but it holds up surprisingly well today. Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Atari A to Z

short;Play, Videos

short;Play: Burnout 2

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Burnout 2 best Burnout? In my mind it certainly is, which is why I was keen to spend a bit more time playing it for this week’s short;Play.

Burnout 2 is one of the best arcade racers ever created, as I’ve already argued at length, and it’s a crying shame it’s not one of the many games from the PS2 era that has ended up with an HD remaster of some sort. Although I worry it might lose some of the magic if ported to modern consoles — particularly if it ended up with a string of patches and DLC attached to it, as some of these remasters have ended up suffering!

Still, there’s nothing stopping us from enjoying the original and best, so let’s do just that. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

short;Play, Videos

short;Play: Inertial Drift

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What do you mean it sounds a bit like “Initial D”? Completely coincidental, I’m sure.

Inertial Drift is a brand new arcade racer with an unusual but highly effective twin-stick control scheme. It’s a ton of fun that channels some serious ’90s energy, and proof if proof were needed that indie devs are on point when it comes to resurrecting supposedly “dead” game genres.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Night Driver

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Legend has it that some people will drive all night just to buy you some shoes. Some other people will drive through the night just to try and score as many points as possible.

In Night Driver for Atari 2600, you’re presented with the opportunity to do the latter in one of the earliest examples of the “vanishing point” racer being adapted to a home console. While obviously dated by modern standards — this originally came out in 1980, adapting an arcade game from 1976 — there are some interesting ideas in this one, and if you let it get its hooks in it can be surprisingly addictive!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

Atari A to Z

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Test Drive

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As a kid, I was always fascinated by games that attempted to simulate experiences like you were “really there” — even if they were fairly mundane.

As such, I found myself drawn to the Test Drive series by Accolade, which promised a realistic (for the time) driving experience in a variety of luxury cars. I only played Test Drive II: The Duel back in the day, so I thought it’d be interesting to go back to where this long-running series began.

Check out my experiences in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Atari A to Z

short;Play, Videos

short;Play: Test Drive Unlimited

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I latched on to the Test Drive series pretty early in my life, because it allowed child-Pete the opportunity to pretend that he was driving a real car. This is something that child-Pete was very excited about.

The series has experimented with a variety of different structures and formats over the years, but it finally became what child-Pete (and adult-Pete) always wanted it to be with the advent of 2006’s Test Drive Unlimited, released for PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and PSP.

Check out the Xbox 360 version in action in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!