Were Racing Games Good Before the PS2 Era?

[Akiba]

Yes the game that never released outside of Japan was "peak".

My girlfriends dad imported a few months after release. And there were ads for it in Magazines for import businesses. Just because it never left its mother tongue until fan translations doesnt mean it cant be peak or wasnt.

If Einhander, Parasite Eve or Vagrant Story never released out of Japan, would that make them any less good?

Racing Lagoon was peak, it was doing what made Need for Speed Underground a smash hit, years earlier with a narrative that in its underlayers one could hold up to the quality of Kojima or any FF game.

 

[MemeAlert]

My girlfriends dad imported a few months after release. And there were ads for it in Magazines for import businesses. Just because it never left its mother tongue until fan translations doesnt mean it cant be peak or wasnt.

If Einhander, Parasite Eve or Vagrant Story never released out of Japan, would that make them any less good?

Racing Lagoon was peak, it was doing what made Need for Speed Underground a smash hit, years earlier with a narrative that in its underlayers one could hold up to the quality of Kojima or any FF game.

Most people didn't played it at the time of release, that is my point. Peak is subjective.

 

[Akiba]

Most people didn't played it at the time of release, that is my point.

Doesnt make the game any less good is mine.

 

[MajesticSiN]

Hell yeah they were.

 

[Tortuga]

Yes the game that never released outside of Japan was "peak".

Majority of japanese games was never released outside of Japan and most of them was peak

 

[Don Patch]

I'd say "yes" but it depends on your threshold of patience.
PS1/Saturn/N64 have a shitton of great racing joints.
Further back it gets spotty, but IMO, there's some real romps on in the 2D realm as well.

 

[Tanner]

Yeah, i kinda agree with OP.

Racing games profited a lot from technological progress and i feel like with the 6th gen consoles the genre was finally not held back by hardware. Atleast if we only look at home consoles. There are arguments to be made for hardcore simulators on the PC or standout titles on arcade hardware which released before that timeframe like Daytone USA which just looks insane for '93.

Tbf i'm completly in the 3D camp when it comes to racing titles. I dont like top down racers too much. Super scalers can be pretty pleasant in my experience. But they're a seperate thing for me? IDK, they're cool but dont provide the same experience like a good 3D racer. Tracks made of polygons are just really beneficial. On top of that comes the physics stuff which is possible in a 3D space alongside the general upped processing power.

I'd argue that there were quite a lot of good racing games in the era before the PS1. They're just not as palatable with our modern tastes, habits and expectations. They are their own thing which can be enjoyed with managed expectations.

Gameplaywise the PS1 already has a lot of bangers tbh. The graphics arent just that fancy yet. But some of the games really made the best out of it with stunning artstyles which still hold up sometimes. The low polycount and the rather low rendering distance can be an issue. That was just objectivly better with the PS2 onwards.

But yeah, i'd say the golden years for racing games was between the 5th-7th gen consoles. Because somehow the genre really suffered the last 10 years.

 

[JPZ]

F355 Ferrari Challenge for the Dreamcast was really good.

Ridge Racer Type 4 and Wipeout XL for the PSX, as others have already mentioned.

I'd also add Star Wars Episode I: Racer and Wave Race 64 for the N64.

 

[Tanner]

I'd also add Star Wars Episode I: Racer [...] N64.

Dreamcast or PC version is sooo much better though. Apart from just more content the framerate on the n64 is just horrendous. It feels like it tanks into the single digits on busier areas on some of the tracks.

 

[>pitchshifter]

Road Rash '95 is still one of the greatest racing games ever. Great soundtrack, funny artstyle, satisfying riding and badass intro

 

[JPZ]

Dreamcast or PC version is sooo much better though. Apart from just more content the framerate on the n64 is just horrendous. It feels like it tanks into the single digits on busier areas on some of the tracks.

I did play it with the memory expansion pack, so that probably helped.

Would still like to try the version on Steam.

 

[Ferik]

Road Rash '95 is still one of the greatest racing games ever. Great soundtrack, funny artstyle, satisfying riding and badass intro

To this day I still associate Rusty Cage with Road Rash more than anything lmao

 

[MegaDrive1987]

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That's Road Rash
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Excellent selection

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 9:12 PM

Personally, I would've put on the Burnout 3 Takedown or Revenge OST, those soundtracks were absolute bangers.

Always a place in my heart for Burnout 3, came out when I was 16 and I've always loved it, for many reasons but the soundtrack is one of them!

 

[qw90700]

Yes the game that never released outside of Japan was "peak".

Neither English nor Japanese are my native language but it didn't prevent me from enjoying video games. If you had existed in the early days of the video game industry then you would have played Japanese games way more than English games you could find around. This kinda made Japanese my 2nd native language in a way I could read Japanese way better than I was able to read my own native language, and then I learned English just to play games lol. Do you know how hard it was to find Japanese and English dictionary and do you know the pain of trying to find the words while playing games? No internet back then, you only have a public library and its not so friendly librarian cursing at you for ruining her lone serenity lol. Perhaps there are more English speakers but the thing is there are way more Japanese speakers who actually play video games than there are English speaker gamers. Currently video game industry is tied to people playing games in non-English language by official or fan translations so they ignore official English translations because most people wanna experience whatever they want in their own native languages. Do you think English language in video game really that matters? If it was they would just translate to English and call it a day, and then they would lose huge sales in most of the world lol. As a gamer not knowing Japanese is a hindrance for your enjoyment especially because official translations have the worst quality lol. But I agree that a person shouldn't have to care learning new languages and companies shouldn't be lazy to at least translate games to English to make a profit without leaving the games stuck in Japanese. Square at the time perhaps didn't think street racing wasn't exclusive to Japan's culture but they were probably too lazy to translate the game as much as many companies back then like CAPCOM and Namco that often cut contents just to translate their games less sometimes lol.

For example Ace Combat 3 is peak in military air plane fighting game that has an official English translation but actually the English version is merely a shadow of the original Japanese self so it actually make the Japanese version the peak one while comparing officially translated to English military air plane fighting games Air Force Delta becomes the peak one lol.

Long story short, how great a game is doesn't depend on whether you can understand it or not. So many kids still enjoys video games they cannot even understand because not everyone knows English. You may cannot understand Racing Lagoon but at least you gotta understand how well developed the game is while Need for Speed Underground and related street racing games like Midnight Club series are just 1% of the shell of Racing Lagoon lol.

Then it make me think why OP think the way they think to write the message. All I see is the expression of they didn't live in the era so they have no idea how these games are important for the history of video gaming. Such people who never existed in the era cannot get how even Test Drive series was a big deal and how Need for Speed series felt flat compared to Test Drive series and Racing Lagoon but they were okay games with better graphics. The thing is better graphics cannot make a game "good" per se but this is the way video game industry is so empty anymore. Realistic graphics but merely a game — nonsense. Games keep being less of a game every year. People who love Netflix buys AAA games for FFF quality and instead of touching grass they enjoy dull realistic graphics of today's games. As a result people like OP says "ugh I think pre-PS2 era had no decent racing game" and I know they mean "no decent game with decent graphics" because clearly they were born in PS2 era or post-PS2 era. I'm fan of PS2 myself and I will always say around that how great PS2's library is but if you had compare video games between platforms PS2 never experienced peak in racing genre at all. For example in terms of visual car modification NFS Carbon was peak, no denying that but still it's an empty racing game as much as Midnight Club 3 for not having actual taste of street racing. Perhaps in PS2 only real deal racing game was Test Drive Unlimited series and Test Drive Eve of Destruction. I would also add Burnout series but they were "meh" fun games that after 2 minutes of crashing cars you just get bored lol. Flatout series tried something new and it only has a different arcade fun, never took the game seriously as a racing game. So after experiencing Racing Lagoon for years excuse me the racing games after it cannot interest me at all because it feels like getting used to driving Ferrari and then they sell a temporary license to rent a horse cart just for $80 lol. In new generation kid context imagine you get used to play GTA 5 but then rest of similar genre games stops being open world or even able to kill anyone you want. This is what racing genre feels since Racing Lagoon lol. Of course there were "close" games since Racing Lagoon like Street Legal Racing and Tokyo Xtreme Racer series but they were not that great.

I'm not sorry for my English. No animals were hurt writing this message and no word ruined the ozone layer. Carry on lol.

 

[diet_orange]

A lot of the racing games for PS1 seemed to try and ape either Need For Speed or Gran Turismo. I have one of them (Car & Driver Presents: Grand Tour Racing '98) and it's alright? It's really weird because you can play it with the original PS1 controller as well as the dual-shock, but as soon as you hit the "analog" button, steering goes immediately from the directional pad to the thumb sticks.

But I digress...

I always preferred stuff that wasn't so heavily focused on real world accuracy and was a bit more arcade like (Micro Machines, RC Pro-Am, Wipeout, Extreme-G, Jet Moto, Mario Kart 64, and Crash Team Racing to name a few)