The Death of Simple Racing Games

[Music] racing games are great I've been a fan of racing games for as long as I can remember and over the years I've played all manner of racing games from simulation to Arcade from Cutting Edge to barely functioning so I'm very aware of many of the shifts and Trends present in the genre like the peak of The Fast and Furious inspired Street racers in the early 2000s the rise of mainstream Sim racers in the 2010s or the non genre exclusive piss filtering of the mid to late 2000s and of all the things I've seen come and go in the genre there's one that's always got to me since we don't seem to see it almost at all anymore and that's a category I would call Simple racing games now what I mean by this is a bit nebulous and encapsulates a bunch of things like I know a number of people who would look at almost any arcade racer and derogatorily call it simple even if it has more complexity to it than an over intensive physics engine no what I would class as a simple racing game is a game that hits a few key points one easy to learn usually hard to master IE a game that is very accessible but usually comes with a comparatively High skill ceiling two straightforward gameplay basically the ability to boot up the game hop past just a couple quick menus and in less than a minute's time be able to get into some kind of race or event three compelling racing this and the last point is what separates this kind of racing game from many modern racing games especially of the arcade variety because despite their labeling as racing games many have shifted their focus away from racing as the primary activity for players which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is one of the key distinguishing factors between these types of racing games and four they're usually arcade Racers the vast majority of games that I would consider to be simple racing games would also fall into the category of arcade Racers but a there's some exceptions to that that I'll talk about later and B I think the label of arcade Racers does fit simple racing games but in a different world way see I look at the origin of simple racing games as being the same as the origin of the racing game in general because back in the 70s 80s and even into the '90s most racing games were built for the purpose of either being played in arcades or being adaptations of arcade experiences and this gameplay mindset would extend all the way to the 2000s with games like midnight club 1 and burnout 2 and even longer in countries like Japan with with the popularity of Initial D and Wun midnight arcade games you might have noticed almost all the qualities I listed for a simple racing game can also be applied to a good arcade cabinet racer because in my mind that's where the origin of this style of game play comes from but you also may know that when it comes to Major racing game releases we don't see many racing games made like this anymore like the majority of racing games out now from major Publishers are either one of two things an open world customization and Community focused multiplayer heavy arcade racing game with low difficulty and a focus on player expression and freedom or a very intensive physics simulation which almost always tries to emulate either a popular racing series or several different types of racing car both of these styles of racing game are valid and I found myself enjoying games in both of these categories but neither one of these archetypes have the simple straightforward appeal of the games I'm covering today and to start I reckon we need to go a long way [Music] back theine everywhere look right on [Music] the feel when while it might not have originated or even pioneered this type of racing game I'm including Ridge Racer because it and all the games in this video are really strong in at least one area which is mostly missing from more modern significant arcade racing titles and while all of them might do some or all of these things to a certain extent Ridge Racers thing is style stylization is one of the key components of the Ridge Racer games and it's what to me makes them still hold up extremely well now from a top down View Ridge Racer is a fairly conventional arcade style racing game with heavy break to drift mechanics meaning the handling is often times less about precise control over your car and more about just going as fast and looking as cool as you can while doing it and it certainly does that well I played the original rid racer Type 4 and five for this video and while the original was fine mainly following the trends of the day in terms of gameplay and presentation type four and five were something different five reminded me a lot of the Tokyo Extreme racer Series in terms of its aesthetic and overall design although being a PS2 launch title it actually predates any of the Tokyo Extreme racer or even kaido battle games that would eventually come to the PS2 although of the ridge Racers that I played type four has to take it from the menus to the character interactions and plot to the incredibly well-designed cars and tracks maxing out what was possible given the then aging Hardware of the PS1 and still looking very visually appealing today because that's what good art Direction and stylization does to the crowning Jewel of this game Style the music the music in this game does not get talked about enough especially the menu themes if it's good enough for [Music] Peggy [ __ ] that [ __ ] I Chang the plan switch my sty like it's good enough for you seriously if it wasn't for the fact that it doesn't have that many songs and that the race themes are a little bit weaker composition wise I would put this in the same level as like a Grand Turismo 4 or maybe even a Jet Set Radio in terms of music because some of the best songs on here sound like the perfect mix of Japanese jazz fusion '90s Club beats and jira all rolled into one and it's amazing Ing and this just isn't something you often see today from racing games its closest analog at the time in terms of style would be the Grand Turismo series and now along with Forza there's almost no unique stylization left in these games with what is left being lifted straight from the games that came before not actually adding on to it although those are Sim Cades and almost all games that strive for some kind of realism in racing games have been basically devoid of any aesthetic for about a decade unless your name is code Masters but even in the arcade Space games like Forza Horizon and the crew don't have much of a unique stylistic identity outside of cluttered and user unfriendly menu designs and an almost universally disliked influencer angle and Need for Speed which on paper has a unique and interesting idea for their game's aesthetic but they ended up not fully realizing it and kind of giving us a game that has cell shaded character designs smoke effects and emotes but then has near photo realistic car designs in my mind I'd much rather have something like a modernized Need for Speed Carbon or street racing autom modelista than this seemingly half-hearted [Music] mix one more WI I TR I feel the need for [Music] [Applause] back yeah [Music] [Music] blur was a game I knew next to nothing about going into this video and something that surprised me was how much reverence this game still has when I put it a poll asking what game y'all would bring back out of those I'm covering today this was actually the winner which was unexpected for me especially since series like Ridge Racer flat out and MotorStorm got several sequels in their series although that may also be the reason why people want to bring back blur specifically so much on a heavily simplified level you could say blur is a bit like a Mario Kart game but with real cars but one there's already the Mercedes-Benz GLA in Mario Kart 8 and two just having powerups racing and lacking in open worlds does not inherently a Mario Kart like make well yes this game may share Mario Kart's love of powerups they function very differently here they share a few of the common ones like the trip mine straight shot homing shot shield and boost blur brings its own variations with stuff like the barge ability which is effectively a close- range shock wave the ability to let the player hold three items at a time letting the player choose whether to fire a projectile forward or backward and giving the player PowerUp modifications that they can choose to apply pre-race this is what blur is good at variation of gameplay because even though I call these games simple if they were too simple they'd get boring after a relatively short time and the variety doesn't just stop with the powerups with the game having its own spin on classic game modes like time attack now having them focus more on managing the player's speed while collecting as many speed boosts as possible and weighing time in inrees against boost depending on the track or a survival game mode where you're limited to the straight firing bolt power up meaning you have to take out as many rival cars as possible with just your aiming but what makes blur really good is that it doesn't just have strong mechanics it also shares a potent aesthetic like with Ridge Racer with a soundtrack very fitting for this style of gameplay a handful of characters that Telegraph what they're like through events that lead up to them and visual design rather than just outright telling you yo I didn't know they had and an unmistakable visual design although myself and many others have chastised modern racing games for lacking in style often sighting things like the insistence on using real life cars or rendering them in the most realistic and often times most sterile way possible blur somehow finds a way to make a unique Style Just might also doing those things cuz it's not like you're going to mistake blur for anything else I think I also made a discovery while playing this game if your racing game calls the experience you get from beating races and doing cool [ __ ] something like Kudos or fans rather than something like followers or influence basically more modern social media sounding terms then your game will actually have a good career progression I also want to point out that this game has car classes like drifty cars off-road balanced and grippy and each of them feel both unique and viable to use don't let the off-road cars low grip stat fool you like it did me almost all of these are fun to drive although that does lead me on to my negatives with the game similar to what I critiqued Burnout Paradise in the last video for that you should watch blur has a problem which might turn off some early game players that being that the starter cars feel really heavy and sluggish to turn almost akin to how early Criterion need for speeds felt even in relatively Nimble cars like the Ford Focus RS and Audi TTR RS although by the time you get to the quicker Class C and B cars most of that kind of goes away I originally had a comment about the game's poor engine sounds but I found out that there's a notable engine audio issue on the PC version that sounds like this but it was only because I was playing it at 165 htz if you lock your monitor to 60 either in Nvidia control panel or something like windows display settings it fixes that so now they sound like this it's also not the most polished game ever but I found it to be one of the more enjoyable games of this type and the funny thing is this game was released just a week after another game I'd consider to be another notable if weaker example of this kind of game [Music] Split Second was another racing game built on its unique gamep playay but in my opinion it wasn't done nearly as effectively as a game like blur my first impressions of the game actually weren't that great like to start it for some reason default to me to 4x3 despite this being a game from 2010 and having cutscenes that are obviously in 16x9 the 4x3 at default of me2 was also 1280x 1024 so the tutorial looked like this and it didn't recognize my controller because I found out later I had to manually bind the controller settings so the first race was also done using keyboard but after that it unfortunately didn't pick up all that much the game is built around a stunt TV show akin to games like Stunt Man or Monster Jam which ties into the game play by having these Dynamic track events which the game calls power plays basically large destructibles and obstacles you can activate to slow down your opponents you can only activate them after filling one of three skill bars you get by doing stuff like drifting and drafting I like this mechanic in theory but in practice it loses a bit of its novelty after the first few races and you can only activate it when your opponents are at a very specific window where it can be used and most of the time it doesn't even wreck them it just kind of slows them down a fair bit I really like this feature in concept but its biggest weak spot is the fact that it's effectively the only way to make up major positions in races because the tracks don't leave many opportunities for the player to gain a lot of time on pure skill and as I'll talk about later with the physics you wouldn't want to try that anyway the AI while not exactly quick are very good at keeping a gap with the player if you screw up/ get screwed over too much and finally there's no boost this is genuinely one of the only arcade racing games after 2005 I can think of that doesn't have Boost outside of Forza and even Forza technically has boost this means the racing ends up being a lot less eventful than it actually looks but if you care more about spectacle than substance this might be the perfect racing game for you because this game genuinely looks like a movie scene which makes sense given that it has the mouse's hand on it one of my friends who actually already played this game before me compared it to a Michael Bay movie extremely over the top and Visually stimulating but relatively Hollow underneath that and I think that's pretty fitting because not only are the traps underwhelming but they're often times just as likely to take you out as they are your your opponents so it's often a bit risky to use them and as I noted the cars really don't drive that great either both feeling under steery and like they don't have strong enough brakes for cars that I'd say easily top two tons but if you're looking for just that kind of spectacle this game offers this might be perfect for you for me I think the next game is more my speed [Music] flat out 2 is one of those games that I've wanted to get to for a while but I couldn't think of a proper reason to tackle it but after some pestering from and a free steamy from Chris who yall might recognize from the live streams and the Highlight Channel I finally tackled it in keeping with the loose Narrative of this video it might be fairly obvious what flat out's thing is [Music] destruction destruction is one of the key points for this game and even though it wasn't as explosive or kinetic as something like Burnout 3 or his soft body focus as games like street legal racing red line or Rigs of rods flat out brings its own brand of deformation and damage that really fits with the gameplay style and art Direction found in the rest of the game like to give an idea of the level of Destruction possible you can start a race with a car that looks like this and end that race with a car that looks like this everything from bumpers getting torn off to shattering glass to even the we falling off happens in this game one of the coolest parts of the destruction model is that if you have a single impact that is hard enough the driver [ __ ] launches out of the car at mock 2 and ragd dolls for a couple seconds which is always the goofiest thing to see it also ties into the gameplay by having several game modes unique to these games like Stone skipping and high jumping along with a few others which are really interesting except for the fact that I uh don't know how these work like every time I did one of these events I guess I just miss something cuz I would always score terribly but there's other unique events like the Derby's that I get down with a lot more these are basically like a much harder version of the Derby events found in a game like dirt showdown so they're a good time on their own flat out 2 probably has my favorite balance of regular races and unique game modes in a career mode in a interesting Concepts like whatever you call this shape racing standard figure8 racing and the AFF forementioned der's but enough standard races to ensure a player uninterested in those extra events can still complete the game these have got to be some of my favorite levels in a racing game like this you have your usual rally style courses and Stadium tracks but then you have [ __ ] like bursting through a swampy Country Club drifting in a dank canal and bursting through shopping malls like a pissed-off Kool-Aid Man the C designs also look like an in between of Burnout Revenge and fuel for those of y'all that remember that game this game's presentation gives me Vibes somewhere between Dirt 2 and Burnout 3 and even though I'm far from the biggest 2000s Hard Rock and new metal kind of guy I still enjoyed a fair bit of this game soundtrack like Rob Zombie the lead Zeppelin inspired sounds of wolf mother and the handful of tracks that I recognize from other classic racing games although this is the only racing game I've ever played to feature Nickelback so zero out of 10 Flatout 3 better the soundtrack gives that same level of aggression that all the classic tracklist from the 2000's EA games did like it didn't matter if it was rap rock or metal basically all of these EA license soundtracks were intentionally or otherwise engineered to be in your face the entire time while while playing and this game does that exact same thing although this game isn't perfect with most of my issues stemming from the driving and the physics the suspension loves to bounce but hates compressing under the car's weight like if you hit a jump more than a foot tall in a stock or near stock suspension and tire setup the car is liable to lose all control I remember people complaining a lot about the cross country events in the Forza Horizon games and how those would always cause you to lose control but that's just a little rebound stiffness increase and a line straightening away from being almost a non-issue here there's not really much you can do except avoid most jumps there's also a similar issue where the cars react to even the smallest bits of debris except sometimes they just won't so you have no idea whether an outdoor seating arrangement is a pile of free boost waiting for you to run into it or a police Spike STM although I really like how you can still see cars crashing into each other after you finish the race sometimes the physics and AI have a simultaneous fit and end up doing whatever this is similar to Split Second this game isn't very good at giving the player the ability to properly recover during a race although like Split Second they do introduce a remedy to this further into the game that being the stronger boosts you can equip in the later game cards because while the starter cars do have Boost it can often times feel like it isn't really doing anything but even then this was a Sublime experience and one that as I'll talk about later had Ripple effects that we still see today in a very particular modern racing game quick note before we continue and this isn't a sponsor but if you like what I do and want to help me continue making better content I've decided to open up a patreon so if you want to help support me you can get extra perks like special roles in the Discord an adree catalog of everything I've made and Early Access previews and behind the scenes to a lot of my video production and channel decisions so if you're interested the link to it will be in the description or the iard above now back to the [Music] video now this is a bit of a weird one for me because before going into this video not only had I never played a MotorStorm game before I barely knew what they were outside of their off-roading basis and Playstation exclusivity but having heard such positive reviews as of late for the series I figured it wouldn't do any harm to include it here now unfortunately I wasn't able to play through the full series both for time reasons and because Motor Storm Pacific Rift was the one I could get running best and despite it still being the best running this is a quick epilepsy warning for the next section I still had issues like this this and whatever this is so you can just imagine how it would have been to try and get the other games working but even limiting myself to just one game this was still a great introduction these games are built around their off-roading festivals which the game calls the Motor Storm Festival think of it almost like Colin mccrae's pro street or V rally Horizon to get a bit of a Vibe of what they're going for although instead of just rally cars you have cars buggies trucks trucks and bikes all competing on tracks that vary from HD Far Cry 1 to modernized Diddy Kong Racing hot top but with added Cliff edges stylistically this game reminds me a lot of oddly enough Forza Horizon 1 not just because they share a lot of that same Festival DNA but mainly because I think a large number of the music choices in motostorm Pacific Rift would work great for the original Forza Horizon with its focus on electronic BMS and rock Headbangers the cars handling in this game is very momentum based like okay you ever hop on Grand trisma 4 or fors Horizon 5 and you get in a d-class car or a slow K car and you notice how your driving changes a little to maximize the amount of speed you retain through corners as much as you can because you're not going to be able to accelerate much well MotorStorm has that too but it's not because you can't accelerate quickly it's because you can't stop yeah you can slow down kind of but outright stopping probably not going to happen that does make some sense given that these cars are almost always driving on loose surfaces but that doesn't explain why the cars also feel really grippy at low speeds and when making moderate steering adjustments but suddenly feel like they're on Ice trying to turn a full corner I guess it's just MO Storm's brand of arcade physics this game was actually very difficult for me mainly because it takes a very different skill set to control these cars and trucks effectively as well as managing the unique boost mechanic the Boost actually does something I haven't seen basely any other double or AAA racing game try the only other example I can think of using this mechanic is X form's Rally Point series which yall might remember from my burn and rubber video basically you have an in inite amount of boost but as you use it you fill up this boost gauge and when it gets too hot well yeah but it cools down when not using boost and also when in water implying that this is basically you melting the engine block with Boost this and the unique gameplay and challenges in the campaign gives the game a unique feel which pairs well with its wide variety of content because each of the main vehicle types has several variations which while not impacting gameplay are nice to see in a game relatively light on customization I liked Motor Storm and I hope to eventually try out the rest of the series although it and many other series of this era are going to be a bit difficult to get running either on emulators or physical hardware and unfortunately almost none of these series are around for any new games this is just the list of games that I could think of that aren't around anymore in the arcade racing space all of them range wildly in scope and appeal but almost all of of them were Innovative topof their class tiles which were successful for their developers and Publishers but in the modern era most of these experiences are being lost to the open-ended non-racing focused and more multiplayer structured experiences of the current set of major racing games but why is that the biggest answer as with most things in the gaming industry is cost but not in the way you might think see this trend of the smaller ablea and AAA games disappearing isn't limited to the racing game Space it's been a trend in the industry for arguably decades especially with the rise of truly Monumental open world games like GTA 5 Roblox and Minecraft making the value proposition of a game which at best is enjoyed for a grand total of 10 to 20 hours is a single player experience not the best in the consumer's eyes the reason this hits racing games particularly hard is that for decades this sector in the market was the backbone for many players experience with racing games with now in my opinion few good exceptions basically all modern racing games fit into those categories I mentioned at the start either Freedom focused open world games that are meant to be played with friends effectively car customization focused GTA or the by-ear launch of another Sim trying to fill what is slowly becoming a crowded market for a niche audience because let's be honest for a second the people actually playing racing Sims 95% of the time are the Casual players who have the stupid amounts of money needed for a racing SIM without caring too much about racing or people like me who car too much about racing enough to in my case drop $500 on a direct drive wheel setup and even though that's a lot I know there's going to be someone in the comment arrogantly flexing a $5,000 hydraulically actuated setup and calling me a filthy casual and those two subg genres of racing game are fine but they aren't what myself and many others got into racing games enjoying however if you look outside of the AAA space there is some good news to be found you may have noticed how I left out some major racing game franchises like Tokyo Extreme racer Midnight Club and burnout and while that's partially because I've already made videos covering those games it's also because parts of those games live on in more modern titles Need for Speed draws a fair amount from midnightclub Street appeal stylistically and criterion's burnout DNA can still be felt an Unbound to this very day night Runners is seen by many players as a spiritual successor to an innovator on the the W gun racing format which txr arguably perfected for console players two decades ago and even one of the games in this video flat out had many of its former developers come together in 2012 to work on a project called Next Car Game which after an arduous six-year development cycle eventually became recfest a game which has seen major critical praise and is in my opinion one of the last great games carrying the ethos of this style of game game play and looking at the Indies that have come out recently like hot shot racing super Wen gp2 night runners or Horizon Chase 2 I think we still might see a Revival of this kind of game relatively soon [Music] can you feel I'm moving moving moving to the he the one for me the back the only me I need alone it's the only way [Music] to me say his name me say his name racer

Channel: Fastminer07

Views: 45,459

Keywords: memes, simple racing game, racing games, ridge racer type 4 ost, ridge racer, split second, blur, blur game, motorstorm, wreckfest, flatout 2, flatout

Id: D6MuzEpoLxc

Length: 35min 3sec (2103 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2024