where do i find a car game
For the low price of me trying to stay logged out of socials you get shorter more haphazard blogs
There was this bluesky thread from aurahack about watching the gameplay presentation of the upcoming car game CLUTCH and disliking two modern car game staples, rewind and line drawn by game to follow. And also everyone should play Gran Turismo 4.
What I have to say is less in opposition to the thread (I'm not bullish on either of the things), and more idle pondering on what an ideal car game would be for me.
CLUTCH is, if I understand correctly, by some of the people who worked on Forza Horizon, so it's something I've been looking forward to myself. I played many car games in my earlier childhood, but I can't think of one more formative to me than Forza Horizon, the first one – not sure if more for my car game taste or more for my EDM music taste.
There are better articles about what Forza Horizon was and what it turned into after the installment I loved. But for what I'm focused on today: in FH, you drive all over the map, take part in races, get more cars, autoupgrade them, drive all over the map, that kind of loop. First game has a kind of an underdog story for the player character, then the second one I never played, then from third onwards the story is uhh you can do whatever you want. Sometimes you're the festival's top driver and its director, which is weird. Sometimes you're buying more and more houses in Britain, which is also weird. Not sure what's weird in 5 and 6 because 5 was too much of the formula for me to stomach, and 6 I still haven't played despite the fact there's a Honda e in it because I'm trying to stick to the boycott.
You could say that at the centre of FH lies the beautiful capitalistic infinite growth. Just keep getting cars and more cars and more awards from spinny wheels.
People say that the contrast to this series is Gran Turismo, and I haven't played the previous entries, but based on 7, no, not at all. I bought GT7 around when I got my PS5, and I finished the "base" quests, but not the extra ones. I think the modus operandi of GT7 is more approachable in many ways. For one, there's a whole "driving school" where you learn how to approach different kinds of turns, how much to brake and how late, stuff like that. And those quests I talked about that drive the game? You set out to collect cars, in sets of three, from races that grant them as first place awards. Once you do, you get a bunch of storytelling about what these cars are, what makes them special, and why they were put in a set together.
I've come back to GT7 after learning that two updates ago they added the old old Renault Twingo to it, and I just barely missed the chance to buy it. But anyway:
Despite posing as a car lover game, and its attention to detail, I think GT7's core is still getting more and more cars. It is dressed up more acceptably, but these quests? Collect cars. Collect more cars. Fuck, the game even has the spinny wheels for undercutting your rewards even though in theory the pool of rewards is greater.
And I would be willing to forgive that, because the idea of driving school, and of another special mode, "circuit experience", where you learn the track segment by segment, is very cool, encourages incremental progress, and being attentive, rather than just dashing from one race to another endlessly.
But I cannot, because I've seen how much better it could be if it took lessons from another game. The 2020 Trackmania reboot.
Trackmania is a completely different beast. There are no cars to collect, you can paint your car I guess, but it's still a Hot Wheels/Formula 1 kind of toy car. There are no gears, the gameplay is very specific arcade type, with tracks being sometimes insane and misguiding levels, and a level editor. Sometimes you drive over a speed boost, sometimes you drive over a "disable engine" tile, it can be very chaotic especially in community-contributed levels. It can be an extremely mixed bag.
But what Trackmania gets perfectly for me compared to GT7 is the flow state of engraving a level into your brain until you execute it perfectly fine. Bounced from a border in Trackmania? Hit one button and you're back at the start line and "3 2 1 GO" will take you like 1.5s. In GT7? The game will show you a fail state for the track segment, and maybe it will give you an encouraging line from an NPC asking you to not give up, and then uhh, I always get confused if the retry button is highlighted or not. Then it's gonna be a rolling start with a nice camera pan and an actual honest-to-second "3 2 1 GO" will finally put you in control, after, if you are lucky, 10 seconds? If you haven't felt the need to throw your controller against the sofa due to the distraction.
That's where Trackmania shines with the short reinforcement feedback loop. So why am I complaining? Well, I do in fact like the cars in FH and GT7. I just think GT7 takes customization too far. I'm currently running into issues with post-main quests where it has me race actual race cars, and it feels very clear that my NPC opponents know how to optimize their numbers and car parts in ways I have no idea about. So even though the game estimates that we are at a similar power level, it's clear that I'm at a disadvantage when everyone takes over me immediately and then stays constantly ahead. This is a thing that people on Reddit have talked about, and it sucks for me. On one hand, the game expects you to master the understanding of the car that you have. On the other, it overdoes the realism of race-fix-repeat loop, adds more fluff to it, and also asks me to drive a different category of car (say, front drive French cars made between 1970 and 2000) for each race. There is no way I'm spending all that time just tweaking a car, especially when resetting takes 10 seconds of me just sitting and waiting.
So, to summarize, I think an ideal game for me would have the snapiness of Trackmania but real and likeable cars that I can master, somehow.
I might be asking for something self-contradictory: mastering cars, when there are so many? But maybe we don't need to be collecting the cars? What if the game gave you free rides of different cars, and then allowed you to just stick to a small handful of cars, tweaking them as needed, for all the races you wanted to do?