Street Racing Syndicate
Street Racing Syndicate is an arcade racing game, created on the wave of astonishing success of the Need for Speed Underground. There were plenty of them back in the days, but only a few deserves our attention after all those years passed. If you need comparisons, I’d say that SRS is more realistic than NFS Underground 1 & 2, and have some unique features to hold player’s interest - the most noticeable, the down-to-earth system of upgrades, and, of course, girls. Girls who encouraging the player with the original driving quests, and awards with private go-go dances, once you achieve something on the streets.
– Real player with 76.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Racing Games.
Pros:
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Great atmosphere, it’s up there with Juiced 1 and Underground 1 as far as giving you a real import tuner feel goes.
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Customisation is licensed, featuring well known brands such as VeilSide, C-West, Wings West, Streetglow and more.
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Performance parts are also licensed, featuring well known brands such as AEM, Holley, Yokohama, GReddy, HKS and more.
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Includes features that Need for Speed overlooked, such as betting on races and crew races.
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Most of the import brands you expect are present, i.e Nissan, Toyota, Mitsubishi, etc.
– Real player with 51.0 hrs in game
Crazy Taxi
“Like Skyrim with taxis” 10/10 -IGN.
“Is that GTA V ?” 11/10 -Random kid walking into my room.
So, let’s begin to be serious. This game is criticized by a lots of players because this is the XBox Live Arcade Version. It can be considered as Crazy Taxi 1.1. The differences that players seems to disapprove is the soundtrack that is a complete new one and the fact that the Kentuchy Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut trademarks were switched to Fried Chicken Shack and Pizza Parlor.
So, here start the personal opinion, I really enjoyed that game. You’re constantly having fun without raging every five seconds. The new songs list is good, the controls still really good (a way to show your arcade skills) and the new patch Sega released for all Sega Dreamcast Collection games gives you the possibility to use your own buttons and add a FXAA to your graphism. The new achievements are very easy, you can do them in a single evening if you understand the engine (If you don’t you can decrease the time difficulty.) Plus, the four characters are still really cool. My personal best is Gus (ಠ‿ಠ).
– Real player with 80.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Racing Games.
Originally I thought this port was absolute crap since a lot of the soul was stripped away, namely the original soundtrack and licensed locations. But this is a PC port, and modding exists. So if you know how to download a mod pack , and you’re proficient in dragging and dropping files in the right place (scary!), then you’re literally a few MB away from playing the game as God intended.
As for the game itself, this game is absolutely wild. The premise is simple: pick up passengers, drop em off as fast as you can. Easy, right? Well unless you git gud , you’re gonna find it difficult to rack up a nice juicy score at the end, which is where the skill portion of this game comes into play. Give yourself enough time and you’ll be setting some amazing scores with what you learn (although watching unskilled players will look like its being played in slow motion). And hey, while you’re learning how to consistently do limiter cuts, you’ll be listening to some hard-hitting punk rock (The Offspring & Bad Religion) that makes this game stand out from other arcade games of the same era.
– Real player with 18.9 hrs in game
FlatOut
One of my top favorite vehicular combat racing games, and for damn good reasons. Also, one of the first games I ever remember playing, back when this came and I was 8 years old.
Pros:
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Graphics have aged well. Sure, there’s no realtime shadows or reflections, etc..but still all in all not terrible graphics for 2004.
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Great sound design. Crash sounds, both obstacle and car collision, are good and really add to the satisfaction of impacts. And the cars' engine sounds are really roaring and crisp.
– Real player with 136.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Racing Games.
A lot of people seem to be writing nostalgia reviews (to the point where “nostalgia” is not only the main theme, but also the only noun present in the whole review). So here’s a newcomer’s take for a change.
Flatout is many things, but firstly and foremostly it’s a racing game. You buy a car, you race AI opponents, get money to buy upgrades, or better cars. Complimenting that you have various ridiculous - but apparently quite iconic - events, which range from demolition derby to a variant of darts where you crash your car into a solid obstacle at speed to hurl yourself through the windshield and onto a gigantic net which serves as the dartboard.
– Real player with 57.3 hrs in game
Driver® Parallel Lines
So firstly off the bat I should say I have WAY more playtime on this, but I recently bought it on Steam and haven’t played that much, so don’t go ‘‘OMG u only haev 2 hrs, wtf m8’’ on me.
So. Driver® Parallel Lines.
This was one of the first games I ever played on my computer and I absolutely adored it.
It is one of the most underrated Driver games, and I recently even saw some hate on it which was really unecessary to be honest, cus this is one of my favorites from the Driver series.
So the price is in fact aswell really low and I think you should get it, cus it’s worth it.
– Real player with 40.9 hrs in game
Well, I always kinda had strange relations with Driver series. Though I usually preferred it to the widely popular GTA, because driving away from lots of cops through city streets was more interesting for me than just making chaos and rampage on streets, I didn’t understand why it tried to parody GTA so much after the second title. The only similar thing between those games was open city, but ideas and gameplay were very different. So, Driv3r was a big disappointment and financial failure, however the series didn’t close and in 2006 we got Parallel Lines. And initially, you think that maybe that is a Driver game we all need: a lot of cars, ability to customize them, a lot of car-related side activities and story taking place in 70s – golden age of muscle cars and car-related movies, what can go wrong? Well, though all these things are technically in the game, the physics itself downgraded quite even in comparison to the third title: cars don’t have inertia, physics is very arcade and you can never lose control of your car even if you really try to. So in the end it feels like you are driving some radio-controlled toy cars, rather than big powerful muscle cars. In addition to all this the game still for some reason tries to parody GTA: yeah, though shooting became much more convenient since the previous game, it still quite far from what GTA had. And no, I do not say that Driver should forget about the guns once and for all, they can be a way to diverse gameplay a bit, like shooting while chasing another car or shooting chasers from the back seat, but building whole levels around shooting only is a very bad decision. At least because it instantly shows shooting system’s problems and at most because the game’s called Driver, not Shooter!
– Real player with 25.4 hrs in game
8-Bit Commando
We wanted the best, you know the rest.
A Contra look-alike, that does not stand to its predecessor. But is it THAT bad? Let’s find out! The game greets you with a nice soundrack and pretty good 8-bit graphics. Unfortunately the gameplay is ruined by bad controls especially in terms of jumping. And when you can’t land on a platform becouse of fucked up controls - you know that this game has an issue. A prefect run can be ruined by a single jump and then it’s back to the beggining or nearest check point (THANKS GOD FOR THAT). Also this game has a TIMER. And when such slow-paste game makes you rush the level becouse of the mistakes you made before - it doesnt’t help the situation at all. At least it has decent multiplayer.
– Real player with 18.9 hrs in game
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Rather than improving upon Contra / Probotector-games due better tech nowadays, this game just feels cumbersome (I really don’t have more fitting word here).
Main reason why I don’t recommend buying this game due how blatantly unfair this game is.
Note, this doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be able to beat this game. But it is still still unfair.
- First of, and the majour flaw: The checkpoint-system is for the most part pointless / not worth it. In fact, it is just better to restart the the whole stage most of the times since they’re really short.
– Real player with 7.3 hrs in game
Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now
Intro
Loved this game for ages, but the flaws are evident and have really stopped me from enjoying it as much lately. It’s unique and you’re not going to get a similar experience from many other games. If it weren’t for the gameplay flaws,
this game would be my second favourite Carmageddon, but they’re just too big to miss.
The Great:
++Destruction looks amazing. It’s as good as Max Damage.
++Base gameplay is so much fun. Like the first game, except improved in every single way (except where it didn’t)
– Real player with 94.3 hrs in game
This game is the most epically entertaining way to waste your readily rather spent hours of a short life. What makes this game good then:
- Still pretty nice damage physics. Seriously. Game is nearly two decades old yet has dynamic deformation of cars, no premodeled damage. You can even split vehicles in half, at any angle..and yet even keep driving depending on how you got split. It’s also cool how your driving is handicapped by getting damage. If your engine takes damage, car accelerates slower. If powertrain takes damage, your car will start braking randomly inadvertently. If your wheels get damage, they’ll wobble and make your car lean constantly to the given side when driving and steering will become harder. If suspension takes damage, your car will steer randomly on it’s own.
– Real player with 47.9 hrs in game
Subway Simulator
First of all, I paid for this game. It’s fun, and I WILL continue to play. However, the paid version has annoying glitches. For my first 2 stops, passengers board and alight as they do in the free version. On the third stop, they board and alight only after you press i for the “please stand clear” announcement will platform passengers board. But then, the box showing passengers stops showing passengers. Subsequent stops show people boarding/alighting only after press i, and no on-screen credit for, or information on them. IT SEEMS, however, that if you finish the route then choose Depot, then you will see credit for the passengers that boarded at the stations in question. There are more bugs to discover. I paid, so I just want it to work properly. However, it’s fun, and I play.
– Real player with 50.8 hrs in game
The game only acts in subway view. Would like to get help from Steam/ Valve, or someone. there is no manual
to help. I do not like the Discussions. Take a long time to find your problem. Take your money and do not offer any solutions, except to refer you to a third party. Well I bought this game on their advertisement and now I cannot get my money back because they said I have played it for 4 hrs. That 4 hours was spent mostly trying to get the game working. I would not recommend this site to anyone!!
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game
Trackmania United Forever
This game isn’t a racing game like all others. Trackmania has its own things that make it a special racing game - the physics for time attacking.
You can ride with cars over nice maps build by Nadeo, or the community in 7 different environments. Collect medals by improving your time. Chase your friends to see who’s the better racer. Build your own maps and share your maps with others, for example on tm-exchange.com. There’s a lot of stuff you can do related to cars.
True, you can do all of this in Nations, but United is another big experience of driving with different cars and enjoying their unique environments. Please don’t waste your money on this game because of Coppers support, it’s stupid.
– Real player with 4560.3 hrs in game
If you give this game only a brief glance, you are going to see a simple arcade racing game where cars look like toys and drive round corners at speeds exceeding 600 km/h. But if you look under the shell and start probing deeper you shall see that TrackMania is in fact many things and it isn’t in fact simple, but rather simplistic.
Do you like hardcore racing where you need to hunt for tenths and hundredths of a second, and even a small concentration lapse can result in a crash when you are on a world record pace? Come on in, there’s plenty of that. Do you like to build maps for others to race at? It’s easy to do that with a built in editor. Maybe you prefer doing various stunts, such as backflips, barrel rolls, driving through loops or just riding the walls in a car? TM is a perfect choice for you. Just in case you like puzzles, there’s a game mode for you where you have to build a fastest way between start, finish and a few checkpoints using a limited amount of blocks. Then again you can just challenge your brain and your very self to try and seek for outrageous shortcuts in others' tracks, as nobody can dictate you the order in which the checkpoints must be driven.
– Real player with 989.3 hrs in game
FlatOut 2™
Best game I discovered by accident on PS2 back in 2006.
– Real player with 14.0 hrs in game
best fighting game
– Real player with 12.3 hrs in game
Hard Truck Apocalypse / Ex Machina
There are a lot of games on Steam, but once in a while, you browse the catalogue and discover a little gem hiding somewhere in the deep ends of the underated section. Ex Machina is one of those games, but let me start off by saying that this game certainly isn’t for everyone, it’s genre is considered to be a very acquired taste, but I would say it’s worth the buy anyway just for the sake of trying it. I didn’t expect it to be anything amazing given it’s lack of popularity, but I was wrong, this game is truly brilliant.
– Real player with 96.5 hrs in game
The Crossout single-player predecessor, Hard Truck Apocalypse (original name Ex Machina fits it even better) was somewhat quite intense when it first hit the shelves. The gameplay (similar to the golden classic of the Russian game development, the Vangers) was quite addictive, with all that driving in the wastes of the post-apocalyptic open world, shooting bandits, upgrading your car, delivering some post quests and convoying caravans… Driving, driving and then some more driving and fighting with your car. There was also an intriguing sci-fi story plot, with some twists and various ways to go through the game (two starting quest lines, non-linear solutions in every big chained mission in every game area, and two endings, with two different boss fights and outcomes).
– Real player with 75.8 hrs in game