Brilliantly designed courses through built up cities and twisting country roads served as the backdrop to some of the most rewarding, addictive driving thrills yet achieved on a console.
#ARCADE CAR RACING GAME SERIES#
The Burnout series arguably reached its zenith with this third entry, where the elements established in the first two games – the boost bar, which rewarded reckless driving with a pulse-quickening burst of extra speed, and the spectacular crashes when said reckless driving inevitably went awry – were honed into a game of pure racing perfection.
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Fast and highly addictive, the Micro Machines games really came to life when played against human opponents, and the brilliant Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament for the Sega Megadrive offered a hugely entertaining four player mode. Playing to the humble NES’s meagre hardware, Micro Machines was a simple, top-down racer where tiny toy cars zipped across such everyday landscapes as a breakfast table or a garden. Despite Codemasters’ reputation for cheap-and-cheerful budget games for home computers, Micro Machines proved to become one of the most playable racing games available for the Nintendo Entertainment System when it made its debut in 1990. In fact, the game originally began life under the iffy title of California Buggy Boys before the Micro Machines branding was applied.
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When Codemasters announced its intention to make a racing game based on a popular line of toy cars, the project sounded like a cynical ploy to make a quick pile of cash. To make matters even more tense, Stunt Car Racer‘s tracks were suspended metres from the ground, meaning the slightest nudge from an opponent would send your flimsy racing cart plummeting to a messy doom.
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Game designer Geoff Crammond created two of the very best driving games for 16-bit home computers in Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix, the latter cramming a realistic racing simulation into the Amiga’s piffling 1MB memory.įor arcade racing thrills, however, Stunt Car Racer was, in the early 90s, one of the very best games of its ilk for home computers.Ĭommandeering an ungainly looking vehicle with a V8 engine strapped to the front, you hurtled along a series of tracks that were more like rollercoasters than conventional racing circuits, with the usual twists and turns punctuated by jumps and insane loop-the-loops.