onlytomorrow void

writing into the void!

"Closing the gap"

or: Racing games may almost never reach their potential

posted on 2024-08-03 by: kirby | 18 min read

Preface

Two of my top ten favourite games of all time are racing games.1 One of them is Burnout 3: Takedown (2004), an arcade racer that rewards you for driving like it’s Crazy Taxi, and doubly rewards you for getting your opponents to crash and gloriously wipe out. Then there’s Gran Turismo 4 (2004), a “racing sim”, or more accurately “simcade” game, and in my opinion the true peak of the Gran Turismo series (Gran Turismo 2 (1999) is close). An metric ton of cars (700+), 40+ track layouts,2 an excellent GT mode, and really fun license tests. It also supported wheels with force feedback at the time (and this worked with my PS4 G29 over PCXS2). Both games were released on the PS2, and both games have their hardcore evangelists (myself included). I absolutely adore both games, and have been playing them since I was a kid. I love these games as racing games for two very different reasons — how both games capture the core of the arcade racer and simulation/career racer genres masterfully.

Old game good, new game bad

This post will probably be some random yapping about why new game bad and old game good, perfect slop for a video essay. But I’ll write this as a blog post after I had already written a few thoughts in a comment reply on Tildes about a year ago.

20 years ago and today

Not growing up, I just love Burnout

Burnout 3.

I still play Burnout 3 to this day. I own and have played through Paradise (and the remaster), but nothing scratches the itch quite like 3. I’ve never been a fan of the straight up open-world style progression of gameplay where you have to drive to the mission or come up with a route to win the race. I like circuits. This is where my bias comes in — I’ve been playing GT as a kid since GT2. Give me a list of races to complete, hand me the cash, then I get a cooler car. Simple, effective, and you mostly are just racing in the game.

Burnout 3 has an amazing map view with various locales and really fun races/events. You’re encouraged to cause mayhem with its franchise staple boost meter, the game feels incredibly fast (60fps! Widescreen! on a fucking PS2!), and the glorious Crash mode where you find the optimal path to causing millions in damages on a traffic intersection. This is how you do an arcade racer.

However, I will admit, Burnout Paradise is amazing, if not probably the best open world racing game. It has something similar to the Crash mode in Burnout 3, but they’re not set stages with interesting routes for boosts and pickups in each intersection. Paradise does the formula better than Forza Horizon (imo), and is neck-and-neck with peak Need for Speed Underground 2 (which cross-promoted with Burnout 3 through in-game billboards). But it just doesn’t scratch the same arcade feel I’d want out of a game like Burnout. Drop in, play and drive like an absolute nut at 300mph on my favourite circuits, drop out.

Back in my day

Gran Turismo 4: you boot it up, pick either Arcade or Gran Turismo Mode, and play as you wish. No bullshit to get to split-screen multiplayer. You get a ton of cars and tracks from the start. The GT Mode career simulation is engaging, starting you with some $20k JDM shitbox and making your way to getting 8 minutes on the Green Hell for millions of credits. Run races, tune your car with your winnings, grow your collection. This felt way more smooth in GT4 than its latest offering. This is how you do a career racer. Not random “cafe book” objectives to unlock like 3 cars at a time or a measly amount of credits,3 or never getting to do a race that starts from the goddamn fucking grid instead of a rolling start.4 Gran Turismo 7 (2022) falls so flat on this progression.

Beauty

More often than not, these games would come with a memorable soundtrack. Need for Speed Underground’s hip-hop sound completes the immersion. Burnout’s teen powered angsty “fuck everything” pop punk rock radio (with some hilarious picks like Yellowcard, Franz Ferdinand, Ramones, Jimmy Eat World) is perfectly capturing of the era and has personally shaped my taste in pop punk and angsty emo 20 years later.5 Gran Turismo always had a smooth blend of jazz fusion, punchy J-rock, and classical tunes to suit whatever mood you felt like driving in. Gran Turismo 7 even has some classic spins on tracks from 4 and 5 — I’ll admit they’re quite great, but nowadays I listen to playlists on music streaming services while I’m on GT7.

Today

I love to play both Gran Turismo 4 and Burnout 3 on the Steam Deck. They feel perfect for the console, and PS2 emulation is handled easily by the Deck, usually giving me 4 hours of play at native res. Both of those games encompass all I’d ever want out of a pick up and play experience out of a racing game. Even better, they’re excellent on PC and you can obviously throw on your own set of graphics enhancements and other changes to suit your hardware.

On PS5, I occasionally play Gran Turismo 7 (yes, it’s the only game I play on that damn console6) when it gets updated with new cars, tracks, or events. The simulation has been the best it’s been, and the Sophy AI is incredibly fun to play against.7 But that’s only half of a desirable experience, especially when the other half is spent grinding for 20mil CR to buy a classic car that used to be available day-one with Gran Turismo 3 and 4. And not the fun grinding like in GT4 — it’s running the same track and crap Group GT3 focused daily races. Did I mention that multiplayer/split-screen is not unlocked in GT7 until completing a certain number of objectives?

State of the art

What are the biggest “racing” games out today? Need for Speed, a franchise that hasn’t really hit home since Carbon back in 2006, now devolved into influencer-influenced anime slidefests frequently placed in the bargain bin of Steam priced at $5.8 Then we have Forza Horizon, a game that vomits out cars at you with a controller-focused handling model and a slog of grind content with laughable DLC and Microsoft integration. And Gran Turismo, my beloved, has fallen into the same trappings as the Horizon series, with slot machines galore and a mission-based progression that is a former shell of the “GT mode” of the past. It is pretty much like a gacha with how little they provide you and how much money they expect you to fork over.

GT7. Guess which one you always get.

Ridge Racer is dead, The Crew is dead, Drive Club is dead, what hope left is there for another true arcade racer? Though, shoutout to Wreckfest, it’s no Burnout but it’s a decent amount of fun. Mind you, I haven’t focused or given much light to Xbox franchises much, such as Forza Motorsport (going down the shitter like GT) or Project Gotham Racing (also dead). I was a PlayStation kid. I’m also not counting kart racers in this, as much as I hyperoptimize turbo powerslide in Mario Kart 8 DX builds.

Reliability is a thing of the past

Let’s get this straight: as far as I know, Burnout as a franchise is pretty much dead and Gran Turismo is a shell of its former self. Burnout’s last release was Paradise in 2008, and EA’s last acknowledgement of the series in a full game was the re-released remaster that barely cut it as a remaster 10 years after the game’s release. The team behind the game (ie. Criterion) are now gone or a new team commanded by EA under the same name to work on the NFS series, an oddly poor merger of two distinct games focusing on two different aspects of car culture. And the communities surrounding racing games today have largely overshadowed the PS2 to X360 era of yore when racing games had a passionate team with creative ideas, visual details pushing the state of the art in graphics at the time (you could argue they still do, particularly when it comes to truly realistic graphics in asphalt and weather effects, but that won’t save your game from being shit), and plenty of playable content with a load of licensed cars to choose from.

These PS2 games were uncompromised in content too — the industry had not caught on to selling entire new areas as expansion packs, or even selling certain packs of cars as downloadable content. All this shit used to be on one disc and you play. Obviously with how game space is nowadays (seriously — Gran Turismo 7 on PS5 requires almost 200 GB of data to store those glorious 4k fidelity car models and textures, and every bit of marble and rock on the asphalt needs to be meticulously included for accuracy), it’s getting to the point where this shit is hardly sustainable.

Title

Yet these large publishers insist on pushing the boundaries on weather simulation instead of fixing the fucking damage model and having a real career mode progression instead of drip feeding with faux battle passes in the form of a “cafe book”. What about fixing online desync errors? Fully implementing Sophy AI into the majority of the game’s tracks? Then, 10 years later, when the licensing for the cars expire, you don’t get to play this anymore, because it’s always online. Gran Turismo Sport (the PS4 one, 2017) died a less-than-graceful death, with online services killed at the beginning of 2024. Forza Horizon 4 (2018) is on the chopping block this year (December 2024), and that game’s not even 10 fucking years old! This is Microsoft’s flagship racing franchise. Come on. What a future!

What about F1 and GT3?

F1 and GT3 (group GT3) games like iRacing (2008), Codemaster’s F1 series, and Assetto Corsa Competizione (2019) are a bit of a weird spot for me. They are very sport-focused, so I think they can’t capture the aspect of underground car culture, or the feeling of driving around in shitboxes making them go fast. I have played F1 ‘18, ‘19, and ‘20, back in the HAM VER BOT era of F1, simply because they had the career mode that I desired from Gran Turismo. Qualifying laps, practice days, GP weekends, the works. I felt like the simulation was not bad, too (except the AI, but I hear that’s improved since I last played). I heard the online sucks ass though, I don’t play these games for that. That’s for Assetto Corsa (I’ll get to that later). iRacing is a true money sink with a subscription — no thanks.

However, what draws me the most to racing games is especially making shitboxes go fast, and the journey to getting there through gradual progression through GPs and perfecting track layouts. So I just play Burnout 3 and GT4 (Gran Turismo 4) instead. GT4 in particular was the perfect marriage of amateur to professional racing on real circuits with shitboxes and lil daihatsu guys that you tuned for 2 million credits just to flex on your gearhead friends.

So wtf do you play now?

As any redditor or avid PC gamer would recommend you, it’s Assetto Corsa (2014). I never understood the appeal of modded Bethesda games, but Assetto Corsa with Content Manager is the closest thing I have that could maybe compare to that. Vanilla Assetto Corsa sucks and is barely a game, so the modding community carries this shit hard. I play with a used PS4 Logitech G29 wheel, pedals, and stick shift that I got off a guy who lived a block away from me for more than half off the MSRP. I play online with other car nerds and weeaboos on the Shutoko Revival Project traffic servers, and enjoy the plethora of community content and cars. Offline, I love doing time trials and hotlaps on various touge courses or real world laser scanned circuits. And of course, driving shitboxes, old JDMs, and the occasional 2004 Ferrari. This shit works in VR, looks beautiful with the right mods, and feels seemingly endless with possibilities. I can drive stick in real life because of this game. I have my beloved configs all backed up and tuned specifically to my liking, with 50 GB of custom cars and tracks. It’s not nearly as big as Gran Turismo 7 on PS5 (170 GB at the time of writing), which is also the only other modern racing game I really play nowadays.

Yeah, after 10-20 hours of initial configuring, Assetto Corsa for now is the ideal racing “sim” for me. It’s barely a game, and more like a LEGO set of half-working shit and making it all work with mods. The sim isn’t perfect with damage or online, but it is good enough. On a good sale, the whole thing is $10. For my arcade needs, I’ll just play Burnout 3. Never gets old. Seriously. My memory card still works on the PS2, and it emulates perfectly now on PCSX2.

Why should I care?

Maybe you don’t. Racing games are a gem of a genre, especially when paired with the right peripherals; it’s unlike any other genre and can get really immersive. It’s sad that they are in the state that they are, and if you give a shit at all, please play Burnout 3, Revenge, or Paradise. Get Need for Speed Underground, Carbon, or the original Most Wanted. Do yourself a favour and play GT3 or GT4 on PCSX2 or your favourite fat home console. Check out my Backloggd for more dumb opinions and shoot me an email. I’m happier writing this out here instead of making yet another video essay on the topic.9

Footnotes

  1. the top ten in question, in order of release date:

    • Mario 64 (1996) obligatory retro pick hahaha
    • Burnout 3: Takedown (2004)
    • Gran Turismo 4 (2004)
    • Shadow of the Colossus (2005) the goat
    • Portal (2007)
    • Minecraft (2011)
    • Dark Souls: PTDE (2012)
    • Mario Odyssey (2017)
    • Persona 5 Royal (2019)
    • Hitman: World of Assassination (2016-2021)10
    ↩

  2. The game’s graphics seriously still hold up. I love the license test where you follow a pace car throughout the entire Nordschleife. It can be an incredibly infuriating test, but it’s the most satisfying feeling getting through the whole track in 9 minutes with a shitty late 80s Mercedes. If you have the chance to boot this game up on a CRT with the PS2, you won’t be disappointed by the graphics. You should also take a look at Special Stage Route 5 or Trial Mountain; they’re absolutely stunning even with emulator upscaling. ↩

  3. Most gamers would consider this Gran Turismo’s battle pass. It definitely is. New “cafe books” slowly get added with content updates containing the new cars and all that. Polyphony are masters of drip feeding content. ↩

  4. It is a massive disappointment that 99.99% of races in Gran Turismo are fucking rolling starts. The suspicion among the community is that the PS5 simply cannot handle rendering all those AI cars on one screen, and setting off all of their physics and AI actions at once. The result? Having to spend the first 5 minutes of every event playing catchup and passing 10 cars that were ahead of you because the event starts you at the end of the pack. You basically gotta work your ass off at the start of every race simply to have the chance of getting a podium placement. I can’t see how much better this could be, when once the race “starts” and you actually get to drive, you can clearly see all of the AI uniformly form a line like they’ve been doing since the PlayStation 1 era 30 fucking years ago. And they’re complete pushovers. ↩

  5. These games, much like its successor Paradise, let you adjust the music in various parts of the game. I always used to only have Yellowcard’s song “Breathing” and Jimmy Eat World’s “Just Tonight” play in the menus and map view of Burnout 3. There’s no other feeling like listening to those tracks right after getting a gold time or successfully crashing 30 opponents just moments before. Then Stryker yaps in your ear about how crazy the mayhem has been. This is peak 2000s teenage gaming. I appreciate the classical music option in Paradise too. ↩

  6. As a great band once said: “One game, I don’t know why, I bought a PS5 with no games to buy…” The only games I have on the console are GT7, Demon’s Souls (a remake), Shadow of the Colossus (a remake, also on the PS4), and Persona 5 Royal (a re-release, also on the PS4 where I first played it. Now, I just play it on PC/Steam Deck to mod the game’s music). Yeah, I just own a steelbook copy of P5R on PS5 as a collector’s item. Sorry. ↩

  7. The past two years have seen Sony + Polyphony teasing their “Sophy” AI that is leaps and bounds ahead of any other driving AI I’ve seen in a racing sim thanks to machine learning. Sophy pushes the game’s engine to the absolute limits11, and it’s definitely the most fun I’ve ever had playing against AI in a racing game. A year after having a “preview” of the AI on a select few tracks, the AI is still not fully implemented on all tracks in the game. The AI is also too advanced for the PS4, so it’s PS5 only. Get the fuck off of that shitty ass console, you’re holding us all back. Just give it up already, it’s over ↩

  8. Hats off to NFS Unbound (2022) for actually trying to get a new identity instead of looking like yet another incremental improvement over graphics we’ve been seeing for the past 20 years. I’m not really into the fake cel shaded anime-esque aesthetic, but props for attempting to push the genre forward visually. I haven’t seen something as visually striking since Capcom’s Auto Modellista, a game I also have owned since I was a kid, and that game’s from 2002. See how this genre has been stagnant for so long? Where’s the mass appeal when half of the modes are dogshit, stripped down, or haven’t improved since the XBOX LIVE days from the 6th and 7th generation of consoles? ↩

  9. I have not watched the various video essays, such as Raycevick’s “I Love Racing Games, They Suck!” video, but that video and many others do end up in my recommended feed a lot. I’m just trying to watch AC mod videos and Top Gear clips man. So instead of watching those, I decided to write this first. Now I can watch the Raycevick video on my next meal! ↩

  10. World of Assassination (WoA) is three games, but it was originally intended to be three seasons as a part of one overall package. Square Enix didn’t want anything to do with IOI after Season 1 (2016), and had to re-release under Warner Bros. for Season 2 (2018). Then they self-released with Season 3 (2021) on the Epic Games Store. IOI then re-released it as God intended on Steam as one big package with all three seasons (2023),12 renaming S3 to “Hitman: WoA”, delisting the separate S1 and S2 games, then in 2024 they split it up again into WoA Part 1 (S1+S2) and WoA Part 2 (S3), and that doesn’t even include the excellent DLC bonus maps. Here we are in 2024 and the “game”/product is a near masterpiece. Too bad IOI continue to sell it in the most unappealing way possible.13 It’s almost like IOI are gatekeeping you from buying the game by ensuring you have the correct plan laid out to simply buy the fucking game. It’s also infuriatingly tied to always online DRM. As I write this, I realize I need to write a post about how good these games are. ↩

  11. They have even learned to cheese track limits much like real humans do in Gran Turismo rules — and the pinpoint precision of how they can pull off this cheese is unlike anything else I’ve seen. They don’t wallride, though! ↩

  12. IOI somehow pulled off black magic and made all three games’ content fit in under 80 GB for Hitman: WoA. Apparently this is because of engine improvements made when they made S3, and so the maps are more smartly compressed. For reference, S1 was around 70 GB alone, and S2 with all of its dlc was nearly 120 GB. It’s insane. ↩

  13. Here’s a tip, 47: if the game is on sale, only get the World of Assassination Deluxe Edition. That’s all three seasons of the Hitman WoA trilogy, and also includes the bonus DLC maps such as the bank and resort from Season 2. Then you can rest easy until the servers go out, and that’s when you have to install a community-made mod that replaces the server functionality. ↩

learn html flashpoint pm me plsss stay down chrome sux vegan nekoscape