Horizon Chase Turbo

A good racing video game is a mystical experience. A bad racing game is a brutally accurate simulation of operating a motor vehicle. Horizon Chase Turbo is certainly not the latter, and, at its best, it often does feel like the former.

Realistic HCT is not. It is unapologetically video-gamey, drawing heavily from earlier racing templates, calling to mind Cruis’n USA for N64, or even Outrun for Genesis. The 8- and 16-bit influences are particularly strong. In this spirit, the graphics are adorably jejune, the designers giving us an abundance of bright, treacly, primary colors on cartoonish cars that cough out polygonal exhaust clouds while conical trees go whizzing by. Some of the rural racetracks in Chile look like unexplored planets in No Man's Sky. Some of the tracks in Japan are classically Orientalist. Some of the best courses are aglio e olio—just the track and cars in the black of night. Turn up the lovely soundtrack—dreamy techno infused with 8-bit melodies—and the experience is blissful.


HCT's eschewal of realism is most helpful with respect to controls. Handling can kill a racing game: get too real with the steering, and your car is all over the course. With HCT, you barely have to take your foot off the gas as you enter a turn, and rarely if ever will you be compelled to brake. This allows for pure concentration on the velocity—indeed, the speed is very vivid in HCT. Open up on a straightaway, and pretty soon it’s just you and the track. Let your nitro boosts fly, and all at once you and the track are one, as are your hands and the controller. You will ask yourself: "Is it my car that's moving? Or is it the track?" And unlike previous 8-bit racing offerings, that blending won't be a negative. Rather, it will be a positive affirmation of the numinous transcendence that HCT offers to the player, however fleetingly.

Needless to say, it's easy to play a game like this. To some, HCT might sound too easy. Admittedly, HCT is fairly simple, in that it's little challenge to finish third right off the bat. However, starting out, it's difficult to win or finish second. You'll need to earn some upgrades for your cars before you can win consistently. Car choice happens race-by-race in HCT, and for this reason, the game is not entirely devoid of strategy. Faced with such a vast variety of tracks, the car you choose has serious bearing on how you finish.

In sum, HCT is not realistic, but it is so fun to play that it’s almost unreal. Just how good is it? It’s better than Cruis’n USA. It outguns Outrun. In fact, your correspondent would be so bold as to say Horizon Chase Turbo is Pro Race Driver good.

Cruis'n USA

You probably expect your correspondent to tell you how Cruis'n USA has aged terribly. In truth, it has aged like fine wine. It's still fun and accessible, with a palpable sense of speed and precarity. You play on the edge of your seat as you encounter the constant head-on traffic. There are lots of crashes, but also lots of lead changes. Some of these derelict drivers come out of nowhere, swerving all over the road—apparently, in the vision of Cruis'n USA, the American highways are replete with drunks. From the west coast to the eastern seaboard, Cruis'n USA is a nice virtual road-trip through the United States, chock full of landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Redwoods, and finally Washington DC. Some levels are charmingly detailed, as is the case in the cornfields of Iowa, where buzzing bugs incessantly hit your windshield. With other levels, some serious liberties have been taken: to wit, the "Grand Canyon" level ends, after a minute and a half of racing, at Mount Rushmore. Creative license aside, Cruis'n USA is a ludic love-letter to American geography. It's also an excursion into an abiding American hetero male fantasy, as Cruis'n USA is all about the women from start to finish.

Indeed, the only thing that perhaps hasn't aged so well about Cruis'n USA is the pixelated bikini girl who’s there to wave the starting flag with dutiful enthusiasm at the outset of every race. Your correspondent refers not just to the in-game pixilation or the sag of this woman’s various appealing parts that has undoubtedly taken place in the twenty-plus years since the game's release. Rather, socioculturally speaking, your correspondent is pointing towards the distinctively male desire—the male gazing—that unmistakably drove the game's designers to digitize her scantily-clad figure and include it in the game in the first place. The gazer-cum-player-cum-driver is undeniably presumed to be a heteronormative, American male.

And all the way through each and every race, the player is accompanied by an unseen female who is along for the ride. She serves as your backseat driver, your guide, and your cheerleader. She tells you to "check it out" as you pass whatever landmark you're at, adding comments like "Wow, the Grand Canyon!" Her wonderment is tireless. When you pass another driver, she tells you to "take it!" She "oohs" and "awws" constantly. In fact, one of the recurrent background songs is a techno mix overlaid with rapid-fire samples of this woman’s "oohs" and "awws"—the whole thing is obtusely sexual. Apparently, this woman fulfills the fantasy of touring the USA by sports-car with an enthusiastic female in the backseat.

Finally, at the finish line, you are greeted by more pixelated cutouts of bikini girls, all of them with arms flailing in celebration. There's also a dude with long hair, jean shorts, and no shirt who’s credited as "Beefcake Boy" and played by one Sal Divita (who also did mo-cap for Mortal Kombat). If you win the race, the image of a thick-thighed girl in a mini-skirt and t-shirt combo rises up onto the screen and then she shimmies on a short loop with a trophy held out for your gazing requirements. She’s played by Anutza Herling, better known by her nom-de-porn, Shyla Foxx. This is what awaits you at the summit of your all-American automotive quest.

The American Dream presents itself

Cruis'n USA, then, is above all about a fundamentally American goal of being constantly accompanied and encouraged by fawning women. But it is more than that, and this is where the Beefcake Boy's inclusion is absolutely crucial. It's not just about the women. Rather, it's about enthusiastic bikini girls and porn starlets in the majority, and whooping, shirtless bros in the minority—this is the optimal proportion in the American calculus of fame. This is the American dream: impressing women and simpletons—one sector has intercourse with you, the other pays money to consume the licensed products wrought from whatever overvalued skill you possess. These are the people you are vying to impress in the USA. Being a winner is about exhilarating the easily pleased, satisfying people who don't wear shirts or pants. This, dear reader, is America at its fullest.

Pro Race Driver

Pro Race Driver is the best racing video game ever made for any system, bar none. Forget Gran Turismo, Forza, NASCAR Thunder, or Flag to Flag. Forget F-Zero. And for god’s sake, forget Mario Kart.

Released in 2002 for Xbox and PlayStation 2, Pro Race Driver was the newest iteration in Codemasters' consistently stellar TOCA touring car game series. While maintaining the precision control and realism of previous TOCA iterations, Pro Race Driver adds a revolutionary story-line element. You control the principal character, steering him through increasingly prestigious auto-racing series, all the while building his driving competencies. You'll go from slumming it in NASCAR-esque stock cars to styling and profiling in esteemed car types like unto F1. On account of this RPG-styled progression, Pro Race Driver has sometimes been referred to as a "Car-PG."

You learn to love your main character. He's not just a faceless driver. His name is Ryan "Octane" McKane, and you are given the opportunity to make him all your own by editing his nickname before embarking on a campaign. The immediate temptation is to go perverse while keeping the rhyme scheme: your correspondent went with "Shit Stain"; your correspondent’s associate decided upon "Come Stain." Either way, the matter of how Mr. McKane earned a nickname so evocative makes for intriguing ludo-narrative possibilities.

These cosmetic considerations aside, the appeal of Pro Race Driver is that you are directing a real man with flaws and vulnerabilities that you encounter over the course of the many raceways. Yes, Ryan McKane can be shrill at times, but he's also persistent and exacting. You see this in the car and on the infield, and you also see this in his dating life. Indeed, one of the subplots has you courting racing groupies (is the term "race rats"?). As you learn more and more about Shit Stain McKane, the man, over the course of various races and relationships, you start to wipe away the flaws and polish up the propensities.

Also worth noting: the graphics are photo-realistic

Each championship series consist of around six races, approximately seven laps each. This is just the right length, not too long or too short. The controls are velvety and user-friendly, and the competition ultra-forgiving, so you'll move through the game breezily. Less time redoing all the racing leaves more time for relating with the ladies (at least in-game).

Given its variety of car-types, its innovative RPG-styled story mode, its realism, and its accessibility, Pro Race Driver is a must-own of the highest order. Beyond all this, it possesses a personality—an unvarnished humanity—that all other racing games lack. This gritty verisimilitude sets Pro Race Driver apart as the greatest of all time. Pro Race Driver outpaces present-day racing games and, best of all, few game sellers realize this—as such, it's easy to find for cheap.

MRC: Multi-Racing Championship

MRC is an abbreviation of “Multi Racing Championship,” but it might as well stand for “Minimalist Racing Champion-ship.” The presentation and features of this little-known N64 racer are minimal, to say the least—most glaringly, there are only three tracks in the entire game. Now, with that being said, the tracks are fairly long and multifarious, spanning craggy mountainsides and European cityscapes, and each one is chock-full of shortcuts insuring that no two laps ever have to be taken in the same way. Part of the fun of MRC is in exploration, trying every track in all possible permutations and combinations of avenues, lanes and off-road terrains, seeing which one yields the shortest lap time. It’s absolutely necessary that you find these alternative routes to shave off the seconds, as every lap is moderated by way of timed checkpoints, which are anything but forgiving. In MRC, as in life, you’ll fail many times before you find your proper path. Thankfully, there are ten different automobiles available, ranging from standard sportsters to off-road vehicles, with which you may traverse this trio of tracks in trial and error. In essence, MRC is about making your own replay value. MRC’s tracks are like the body of a long-term lover, in that you have to be willing to familiarize yourself with every twist, turn and sinuous curve in order to keep things exciting. With MRC as with love, if you put in the hard work with what you’ve been given, you might just be rewarded maximally for your efforts.