Racing / driving games: What do they get right? What do they miss?
I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my kid the other day and it was a blast. Nintendo have really nailed this game, especially in the balance of accessible enough for beginners to have fun but hard enough for people to have a challenge too.
My other favourite game (although I haven't played it for a while) is Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn. This game has 4 tracks (one of which needs to be unlocked) and 3 cars (and again, one of these needs to be unlocked). The tiny number of cars and tracks means that you get to do the same corners over and over. This might sound tedious, but when you hit the corner just right you know it. You can get a sense of mastery over it. I've spent many hours playing games in the Gran Turismo series, and I really enjoy them, but fair play some of the tracks and cars are just shovelled into the game and you don't spend much time with them
In the first Gran Turismo the licensing tests were properly hard. They weren't messing around. Getting bronze requires people to read the manual and understand what the point of the test is. Getting all gold is an actual challenge for experienced players. I feel like the tests (at least, the bronze levels) got easier in later games. The UK soundtrack was small but pretty good.
My final mention is the Burnout series. I loved the crash junctions. I'm not sure the open world of Paradise was fun - it meant spending a lot of time driving across a map to get to the start line of various events. I feel the same way about many games - I'd rather just have a menu of levels and what I need to do to complete them (GoldenEye, SNES PilotWings, BlastCorps are all good examples) than have this stuff obscured by the open world. Burnout on the Nintendo DS was a genuinely awful game. I think Burnout Dominator was my favourite in the series.
So, what do driving games get right? What do they miss? What interesting game mechanics do you enjoy?
Sports games changed similarly to RTS games that we discussed on the other thread. They became more specialized and complex, with an emphasis on the simulation aspect. I have played racing games, but the genre that I followed the most are soccer games such as Fifa and Pro Evolution Soccer (previously known as Winning Eleven). Up until the Playstation 2 era, soccer games had a good balance between accessible fun and simulation (relative to the available technology at the time). At some point in the PS2 era, both Fifa and PES became increasingly realistic and dense.
At first, my group of friends was okay with it, since the more advanced features were more or less optional. But, when PS3 and Xbox 360 came along, AAA soccer games became so realistic that they became a joyless chore unless you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of time to master them.
More recently, emerged independent games with a focus on old-school fun, such as Kopanito All-Stars Soccer and, to some extent, Rocket League. But those games are themselves examples of specialization since they are laser-focused on an arcade-like non-realistic experience. We will likely never be able to play a soccer video game that strikes a balance between accessible fun and realistic graphics/gameplay anymore. And I could say the same about racing games. You'll either get a game that feels a lot like driving an actual car, or games like Mario Kart or Sonic All Stars Racing ransformed. And nothing in between.
I played the absolute shit out of Gran Turismo when I was a kid too, and loved it for many of the same reasons you mentioned. I even enjoyed grinding the 1hr+ endurance races to efficiently get enough money to buy all the high-end supercars in GT1. But TBH, with so many other things competing for my attention these days, and a desire to often just relax (instead of stress out, and concentrate hard) when playing a game, I don't think that level of difficulty or commitment is something I can actually tolerate much in a racing game anymore.
So as a result, my favorite racing games lately have been all the Forza Horizons ones, since there are plenty of unique activities in them to for me to choose from, with various levels of challenge to them which I can even scale up on-the-fly depending on my mood. And even when I am not in the mood for any challenge whatsoever I can still thoroughly enjoy playing them by simply driving around in their massive worlds at ridiculously high speeds, and barely grazing passing cars for extra points, which is super satisfying, and almost meditative. So that's what I think they get right, and do better than any other racing games out there right now; Allow me to easily tailor the experience however I want to, and provide me with a huge amount of options and variety for things to do. They're also just the right balance between realism and arcade racing (which can also be adjusted on-the-fly!), and the music totally kicks ass too. ;)