Main -- Main Archive Page -- January 2003 -- Addicted to speed | « Waiting for Unio - Keylock »
January 15, 2003
Addicted to speed
We are the master of
You get to drive either a street car or a full-blown race car in an area that features both a twisty road track and a drag strip. You can drive the car from a cockpit view or from a number of outside views. The controls themselves are simple -- mouse up to accelerate, mouse down to ease up or break, left button to shift up, and right button to shift down. Yes, you do have to shift, although the clutch kicks in automatically. And if you do miss a shift, you can screw up your whole lap.
There aren't any other cars but yours in the game, but the game gives you your lap times and helps you keep track of your progress.
There are a lot of aftermarket tracks and cars for Racer collected at the Racer-Xtreme site. A fun thing to do is find one of the simulations of a real track (England's Brands Hatch is my favorite), pick a real car type that races on it, and see if you can beat the times from an actual race. I can't, yet -- but driving with a mouse instead of a wheel is a bit of a handicap.
Although the program is very much a beta, it is very configurable and tries to be realistic, not "fun." Where it isn't realistic, the programmer is pretty straight up about it. The emphasis seems to be more on engine and tire characteristics, with suspension and aerodynamics second -- but gravity and inertia are certainly in effect. One possible problem would be "impossible" tires, created by fiddling with the tire sim numbers to make them better than real tires. But I'm not sure that has happened with any of the cars I've downloaded.
Another minor gripe is that some cars are designed with a lot of detail, and that can halve the frame-rate of a slower system (like mine). It would also be nice to have an on-screen "break mark" that would show the transition from letting off the accelerator to actually putting on the breaks.
But all in all, Racer is a really fun driving sim. The program is freeware, but not open source (although the source is available), and has been built for Windows, Linux, Irix and Macintosh.