Ok, watching the Monaco GP today. I have to admit, it’s made me catch a bit of a racing game bug.
My older brother and I used to play the heck out of the Ayrton Senna GP game on the Genesis. He was really into Formula 1 back then so we played a lot of racing games. I used to play the EA Nascar game about ten years ago, I still have my steering wheel and pedals for the 360 (that probably don’t work on PC).
So, a couple of questions for those of you that know the history of racing games...
1. I am a sort of jack of all trades (master of a few, mind you) but one thing I have absolutely never ever been into or known anything about is cars. I dig racing though. But car engineering, tech, parts, etc, zero knowledge. Ok, maybe a hair above zero. My brain refuses to understand manual shift in cars. Is playing a good racing video game on automatic and only steering the equivalent to racing game enthusiasts of someone who says they wanna play a baseball game by only pressing ‘swing’ or playing a basketball game where you only press ‘shoot’ and everything else is automatic? Basically, is the beauty of racing and of a good racing game tarnished by someone who leaves everything on automatic?
2. If there were a prime Formula 1 game, would it be the recent Codemasters game? Or like with NHL are the best games 10 years old? I've heard about rfactor and GTR2 but don't know anything about them. But I would have to say that Formula 1 is the extent of my interest in racing. (That being said, my absolute dream game would let you drive 1920s-40s cars on city streets, but I doubt that exists
)