Dreamcast Racing Games Article - Tell us what you think!

[bacardipr05]

I only just dabble in racing games. Sometimes especially with some of the Sega racers i find them hard and give up. I do have a copy of Test Drive Lemans hopefully somewhere. TD Lemans comes up frequently in tech conversations regarding the DC poly processing power. It is a nice game to look at in VGA. I went to play my V-Rally the other day and noticed the CD was cracked in half. ... I think you will enjoy V-Rally. In fact my order me another copy one day. Back in the day we had a lot of fun playing it as a party game of sorts.

[noiseredux]

I really need a racing wheel...

[bacardipr05]

Oh an by the way excellent write ups.

[marurun]

I really need a racing wheel...

Me too...

Le Mans I have a copy of and hit a roadblock. It doesn't work on mod chipped Dreamcasts like mine.

Dreamcasts are cheap these days. Get one so you can play this. You will not regret it. It is one of the best racers on the system, including for multi-player, as it supports 4 racers at a time. I think the control is pretty spot on, as well. Some of the extra cars and tracks are difficult to unlock, however. There's a car you can't get without racing the ACTUAL 24-hours of LeMans. I would LOVE to know how many people legitimately have that car unlocked.

One title you're missing from your line-up is Vanishing Point. It was overlooked when it came out, but I think it's actually a top-tier racer. There's vehicle customization and unlocks, not to mention lots of crazy stunt and puzzle modes to go with the basic racing. Many folks don't like it because your initial car choices are less than spectacular. Racing a Ford Explorer is kind of a handling nightmare, but once you get better cars it really opens up.

[noiseredux]

One title you're missing from your line-up is Vanishing Point. It was overlooked when it came out, but I think it's actually a top-tier racer. There's vehicle customization and unlocks, not to mention lots of crazy stunt and puzzle modes to go with the basic racing. Many folks don't like it because your initial car choices are less than spectacular. Racing a Ford Explorer is kind of a handling nightmare, but once you get better cars it really opens up.

I actually played it for the first time last week. It seems surprisingly good, but again, I need a racing wheel.

[CD AGES]

Nice article! Been waiting a while for it

Concerning Hydro on DC, the later red disc release is VGA compatible (Hot New or SAS which is basically the same release disc). Even the launch blue disc version can be forced to to work with a VGA signal so its all good.

[wryguy87]

Ah yes, sorry. That's a shame. Might be worth borrowing a regular DC for a spell.

As for F1, it was quite well rated on the N64 and if you're looking at rally, track and stock car style racers it might do well to add an F1 racer for balance.

Yeah, that's a fair point. I'll have to find out which one on the console is the best of the bunch.

I only just dabble in racing games. Sometimes especially with some of the Sega racers i find them hard and give up. I do have a copy of Test Drive Lemans hopefully somewhere. TD Lemans comes up frequently in tech conversations regarding the DC poly processing power. It is a nice game to look at in VGA. I went to play my V-Rally the other day and noticed the CD was cracked in half. ... I think you will enjoy V-Rally. In fact my order me another copy one day. Back in the day we had a lot of fun playing it as a party game of sorts.

Aside from Le Mans I've actually never lent a lot of credit toward the Test Drive series, and actually the Dreamcast version of Le Mans was made by an entirely different team than the Playstation version. It's not actually the Test Drive guys who made it.

I was considering V-Rally but the Test Drive series generally has a very sub-par reputation actually. The actual Test Drive team released some real stinkers like Test Drive 6 on the console.

In general I've tried to keep PS1 ports off this list because you can tell they weren't designed with the Dreamcast in mind. No analog. Thus the gas pedals and steering feel like you're playing on a PS1 controller with a D-Pad and flat buttons.

V-Rally is the one made by the actual Test Drive team that keeps popping up, so I'll look into it.

Dreamcasts are cheap these days. Get one so you can play this. You will not regret it. It is one of the best racers on the system, including for multi-player, as it supports 4 racers at a time. I think the control is pretty spot on, as well. Some of the extra cars and tracks are difficult to unlock, however. There's a car you can't get without racing the ACTUAL 24-hours of LeMans. I would LOVE to know how many people legitimately have that car unlocked.

One title you're missing from your line-up is Vanishing Point. It was overlooked when it came out, but I think it's actually a top-tier racer. There's vehicle customization and unlocks, not to mention lots of crazy stunt and puzzle modes to go with the basic racing. Many folks don't like it because your initial car choices are less than spectacular. Racing a Ford Explorer is kind of a handling nightmare, but once you get better cars it really opens up.

I probably should get another Dreamcast anyway since mine keeps getting moved around for parties and I'm kind of tired of hooking it back up to my TV constantly.

I'll admit that being a PS1 port and having a less than exciting selection of cars I overlooked Vanishing Point, even when people consider it a gem. Any idea if it has analog like I was talking about before?

Nice article! Been waiting a while for it

Concerning Hydro on DC, the later red disc release is VGA compatible (Hot New or SAS which is basically the same release disc). Even the launch blue disc version can be forced to to work with a VGA signal so its all good.

Yeah, I covered the version of the game that has VGA at the bottom of that entry. I just tried the swap trick for the original Hydro Thunder and it doesn't have any sound effects, though my copy of the game likes to act up.

[Crynox]

Hey, guys. Name's Mike. I'll be writing some articles for the site on and off whenever I can muster the free time. My first project has been a fairly thorough racing/driving games article for the Dreamcast. Considering everything's relative I thought I'd open it up for commentary in case people have games they want to help add to the list, or thoughts on pre-existing entries.

Metropolis Street Racer
Technical knowledge required: Below Average
Driving technique required: Above Average

MSR was one of the better racing games on the Dreamcast thanks to responsive control and physics that strike a very nice balance between realism and fantasy. Developed by Bizarre Creations in conjunction with Sega, this was an attempt to get a more mainstream racing game on the Dreamcast market. The concept of MSR is simply street racing through London, Tokyo and San Francisco. MSR was quite notable at the time for the attention to detail placed in recreating real locales.

To advance through the game you need to accumulate "kudos" which are given to you for driving stylishly. This idea devolved into constantly penalizing the player because "kudos" are also taken away from you for each mistake you make. You can win a race but not actually win it, basically. Another issue that hurts MSR is that if it's day in San Francisco it'll be night in both London and Tokyo. That means two thirds of the game are usually spent driving in the dark, which means you'll make more mistakes.

Something that could have helped the game is the ability to retry races if you've performed poorly. You're only allowed to quit a race entirely and sit through multiple loading screens to try again. MSR tries the players' patience a bit too much but it's still one of the better Dreamcast racing games. It had some good ideas (several rarely imitated) and the handling feels very rewarding. There's a certain attention to detail in MSR that give it charm despite the flaws. MSR could be thought of as the prequel to Program Gotham Racing. Bizarre Creations was unfortunately shut down after being acquired by Activision.

[/quote]

Whoa!

The kudos system does not penalize the player! It is a very unique idea of risk/reward in which race by race you can either leave alone or increase/decrease your kudos earning potential by adjusting the difficulty level of the particular upcoming challenge.

The risk is that if you do not achieve `your` objective, (that only you set), you will lose the kudos that you gambled. On the flip side the reward is that you achieve your goal and you are then rewarded with more kudos points which then enable more stages and new vehicles.

As long as you err on the side of caution you generally achieve your goal and therefore earn more kudos, therefore unlocking more of the game. In my experience this lends itself well to stage replaying because after your achievement you realise that actually you could achieve a bit more and therefore you play again but increase the risk/earning potential, which if you pull it off, end up feeling a great sense of satisfaction.

As for offering a retry, that would be silly as it would negate the whole idea of self setting difficulty, (risk/reward).

If you are feeling penalized, its probably due to setting the difficulty too high, (too much risk).

Right then, the time of day setting. This is not an issue, its another unique idea yet to be utilized in any other car game to date. Put simply its a brilliant idea, it makes the global cities feel real as you are experiencing the correct daylight settings at that time. Obviously this means that it could be dark or early morning/late evening depending on where you live in the world. The fact that you may find it harder to drive it night is just a fact of life, after all the same is true in real life. See it as a challenge rather than a set back. I do understand that we all play our games at the same sort of time so therefore the daylight settings around the world would be consistent, but I found myself going along with it and varying my play times to experience the different time zones. For example I found that I would only play the Tokyo tracks at night because I thought they looked great with all the lights etc.

Ok MSR rant over! (Yes I love it!).

Other than that, some people have mentioned some of my other favourite DC driving games, so, here's my take on them:

Le Mans 24hr:

Another amazing driving game, I've played through all of this twice and thoroughly enjoyed it. The best bit is definitely the 24 hours, (real time), race that can be saved every couple of hours when you enter the pits, (why couldn't this be true of the GT4 endurance races ?), I think that the handling is spot on, (once you remove all driving aids & select pro etc), I loved driving the Porsche 911 and struggling/breaking into the next class, (David and goliath), and the gradual day to night and back again cycle is genius, it happens so slowly that you don't really notice it, until suddenly your lights are on and its dark, very dark. The sun coming up in the morning is a real pleasure, (and relief to see).
Great game, (and nothing to do with `Test drive`. Only the American copy had this poor endorsement).

Vanishing Point:

What a hidden gem. Very off putting at first due to the highly sensitive handling but once you master it, wow what a game. Lovely graphics and really catchy music and a real sense of tension as you swerve in and out of the traffic trying to achieve the specified position within the set time limits. I played this game to death.

F355 Challenge:

Another game I played a lot. I loved everything about this game, recommended to all.

Daytona USA 2001:

I'm one of those that was put off by the highly sensitive controller, however I'm going to give it a retry thanks to the `play` option true meaning explanation, so thank you for that.

That's my 2 cents worth.

[noiseredux]

^awesome post. You really piqued my interest to give MSR another try. You also made me want to check out Test Drive Le Mans, as I knew nothing about the 24 hour endurance race.

[Sload Soap]

Hmm, I gave MSR another go the other day. It's still pretty good and handles well, but the kudos system penalizes the player when other cars crash into you. This is obviously annoying and happens way too much. It also seems to force you to ramp up the difficulty a bit as you don't earn enough kudos from ordinary races to unlock later stages and challenges. It's a bit tetchy and cryptic.

The day night thing is cool in theory, but in practice you have a semi-serious racing game with a teleporting avatar zipping back and forth between London, San Francisco and Tokyo. As Wryguy says, you mostly spend 2/3 of the game in darkness wherever you live.

I see MSR more as Bizarre Creations prototype for what would be much better games with their Project Gotham series.