Tweet
I was a very serious player of driving games just before the PlayStation 1 came out 20 years ago. It's debatable whether I played racing games or not, even - these were things to be studied, analysed and perfected. A friend gave me a copy of Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix, after trying to convince me how much fun it was to play the idiot, switching the invincibility on, turning 180 degrees and eliminating every car on the field before turning back around and claiming the win. I wasn't much good at hiding my disgust. This, I assured him with all the pomposity of a teenager, was most definitely not what it was all about. For me, Formula One Grand Prix was something else entirely. I'd simulate every practice and qualifying session, printing off timing sheets and going through them before I'd set up a full-length race every other Sunday. In the days between races - I could only ever race on a Sunday, as anything else would be sacrilege to the sport - I made my own magazine, with full race reports on the simulated season and fictional gossip on the driver rivalries I'd made up in my head. I wasn't, as you might have guessed already, all that to hang around with.
And then Destruction Derby came out, and showed me that I was wrong. It turns out that driving head-on into a field of cars can be kind of awesome.
Read more…
More...