Games

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.

Dirt Rally 1 and 2 are both very fun.

Assetto Corsa is a fantastic simulator that me and my race team has used to learn a track before we take our race car there so we know all the turns. It really feels like you're there and the game runs well and looks good low end hardware.

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

It's difficult to say. One of my least favorite mechanics in racing games is rubber banding. Another is rewarding people in last place with a powerup and punishing people in first for being good at the game (looking at you, every single Mario Kart title ever). That being said, there are games without these mechanics and they wind up feeling lifeless, such as Motorstorm and GTA Online races. So the trick to enjoying racing games I've found is to play games that only minimally rely on rubber banding, and without blue shell tier powerups, or racing games that deprioritize ranks in favor of adding tons of personality to the experience.

Racing games that truly don't offend me:

• Crash Team Racing
• Star Wars Episode 1 Racer
• Forza Motorsport 2
• Burnout Paradise

Need For Speed Underground 2 I would list as a solid GOAT for the genre of open world arcade racing.

Dirt (series) - because I love rally racing.

Motorstorm (series) - because racing across an active volcano is fun as fuck.

Carmageddon (series) - because it’s insane and hilarious.

Twisted Metal 2 - not really a racing game, but close enough.

There a quite a few favourites over the years.

• Colin McRae Rally 2.0
• Live for Speed
• Hydrothunder
• Metropolis Street Racer
• Forza Motorsport 4
• Burnout 2
• Blur
• Wreckfest
• Gran Turismo 2
• Wave Race Blue Storm
• F-Zero X
• GRIP (and Rollcage 1 & 2)
• TT Isle of Man
• Dirt Rally 1 & 2
• Circuit Superstars

Assetto Corsa Competizione (Sim), if you like GT track racing.

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.

Diddy Kong Racing on N64. There's no other that come close for me.

You can use either vehicle, hovercraft or plane. Depending on the tracks. Some tracks you can try using any of them. Some are vehicle specific.

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. If you hit two different balloons, newest balloon override over your last. 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. And what's the worse is the fact that other racers doesn't care about coins. You have to get all coins and be in first place to clear the track.

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 much 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 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.

Although I haven't played a lot of them, my favorite is Colin McRae Rally 2.0, which is predecessor to the DIRT series.

I used to watch my uncle play on his computer in the 2000s.

I've been playing beam ng drive on my steam deck recently. Haven't got any experience with other driving games but I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Crash Team Racing is the pinnacle of kart racing games. The driving is more skill-based than the leading brand name, and it doesn't have shitty rubber-band AI.

Star Wars Episode 1 Racer is still great fun, easy to learn but hard to be good at.

Nothing compares to F-Zero GX. The abandonment of the franchise is a travesty, and should be considered abuse of the gaming community.

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

Probably DiRT 2… Overall just did everything right for me, no complaints at all.

Mario Kart DS.

Shit’s a masterpiece.

Split/Second

Make Way

Mario Kart

I have a type.

Had fun with the original Forza Horizon and Midnight Club L.A.

The absolute best arcade racer to me was always NFS Hot Pursuit 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

https://store.steampowered.com/app/358270/Death_Rally_Classic/

Free nowadays.

i am a diehard for old school SEGA sprite-scaling racers. OutRun, OutRunners, Super Hang-On, GP Rider, and Power Drift are all must-plays. they all run great in MAME and have also had a number of high-quality console ports. later polygonal titles like SEGA Rally and Hang-On GP are also great but will be less impactful if you're already used to modern racing games

i see a few comments mentioning different F-Zero games and would like to throw F-Zero 99's hat into the ring. the sheer chaos of that game is really something you have to experience for yourself

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 (this is 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,re not developing it anymore (in terms of new content... game breaking bugs probably get fixed) 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.

Forza Horizon 4. I fricking love the British countryside!

Does wipeout count as racing?

I have a work-in-progress list here, strictly games I would consider "must play" in the genre. Notably missing the Ridge Racer and Tokyo Xtreme Racer games because I haven't played enough of them to have an opinion.

https://howlongtobeat.com/user/atmur/lists/40754/Peak-Racing-Games

Mostly arcade and simcade racers though. If you're interested in sims:

For modding, Assetto Corsa is basically the modern rFactor.

For offline racing, Automobilista and Raceroom have pretty solid AI. Note: Raceroom's pricing model is dumb, kind of like iRacing just without the subscription.

For career mode, Project CARS 2 (not 3) is basically the only sim that even tries.

For online racing, ACC and iRacing are unmatched.

For rally, you're already playing DR2. Richard Burns Rally is also shockingly good for its age.

My all-time favorite was the first Test Drive Unlimited. Beautiful racing across Hawaii, absolutely no story lines which got in the way.

Forza 3 was peak racing in my world. Forza 4 killed my interest in the genre.