5 Racing Games with Unique Features You Probably Forgot About Pt.2 #BlogPost

5 wasn’t enough for you guys eh? I’ve seen some comments and suggestions about games I haven’t touched base on, so why not include 5 more here? The list is entirely subjective don’t forget. No hard facts here, just the open mind of a teenager.

Also I don’t feel like including publisher names in here this time, too lazy.

Disclaimer aside let’s begin.

Midnight Club : Los Angeles - Weight Distribution & Rate my Ride

Yes, yes, I know. 2 completely different game qualities. But when was the last time any game you know has utilized these? Weight distribution can be interpreted in a number of ways for the older MCLA players. In a car you could prop the vehicle up on 2 wheels and drive that way, in the sacrifice of speed and stability. You could also do this on a motorcycle, distributing weight from front to rear, side to side; which in turn allows you to hit that perfect racing line without much interuption from the infamous understeer you faced in that game. You didn’t do that, you’d have been eating the outside barrier of every corner you turned, and ran that wall like the old Underground days.

Rate My Ride was definitely unique. Anyone who was anyone, with internet connection that is, would upload 1 of their rides up to the Rockstar servers and showcase their work. Whether it was an Impala with Scissor doors or a Saleen S7 with a tron livery to it, you pretty much saw every possible car and accessory modification to date. You could even opt to BUY a car you thought was cool off the guy for a certain price.

To the points of Pink Slip races, Car Deliveries, and that Carol mission where you wreck people’s cars, games before it, and after it as well have utilized those features in a number of ways. I say unique in the sense it hasn’t been replicated, or replicated extremely poor.

The Crew - The Essence of the CaRPG & History Lessons

Admit it. You had no idea this would be in here. The game is only 3 years old, and everyone still plays it, but you probably never took into consideration these points I’m about to make. If you have…..well fine, be that way. The Crew was almost like an MMORPG. You can make that comparison due to its wildly expansive map layout, the classes of cars you can opt to drive, and the tiny challenges would equate to side missions if you want to get technical.

The classes of car, not in any particular order go as follows;

Street
Dirt
Performance
Raid
Circuit
Drift
Drag
Monster Truck
Police

You see all of them? It’s like choosing a character in Overwatch. Every character has a specific attribute to contribute to the game objective, and The Crew is no stranger to that field of gameplay.

Now you were probably all stumped on the “History Lesson” bit. You remember those Landmarks you had to visit, and for some reason the game rewards you half a million if you view them all? Welcome to school again. Each Landmark you found gave you a 2 sentence summary of what that portion of the US holds in terms of historical past, and it was pretty damn cool in my opinion. If you can find me another game with the same feature as this, I’ll jump off of something really high for no reason.

Driver : San Francisco - "Shifting"

6 years ago, in 2011, the 7th generation console owners with a knack for racing games got a massive surprise from Ubisoft. Driver San Francisco’s plotline was amazing. An SFPD undercover officer, John Tanner, was injured in the line of duty chasing the infamous Charles Jericho. Essentially you play through the whole game in a comatose state, only to wake up and realize it was all for nothing, and Jericho and made the bomb of all bombs.

Now being in the state of comatose, reality no longer applies here, thus giving our good ol’ friend John the ability to “shift” between cars. What this means is assume the role of someone else’s body who’s driving the car, effectively having you switch to a different car in general. This can be used in the event of a police pursuit, a race, or just for the sake of driving ever possible car there is in that game. But there is a catch, you can’t just swap to another car during a pursuit per say and drive away, instead you need to either disable the cops surrounding the main vehicle, or to maneuver and slither away in the back alleys and one-way streets.

Also lets not forget the homage parking garage event that dates back to the original Driver. Crafty Ubisoft……

NFS Most Wanted, Carbon, Undercover - Pursuit Breakers & Speed Breakers

It’s been nearly a decade since we’ve seen a pursuit breaker in a NFS game, and that upsets me a bit. Most Wanted really set the proper foundation for what an open world should be, but ever since Black Box was executed by EA none of the NFS games prior to Undercover were as much fun. Criterion games physics engine really only gives you a greater sense of speed and the ability to drift, but then you lost the timeless arcade feel that the previous titles held, and therefore that game loses the charisma that NFS once had, and you’re essentially paying $60 for just the title and nothing else.

Crying session over, the pursuit breaker was the ideal way to evade police custody. If you didn’t know the location of every single one of them, you had about a .9% chance of getting away depending on your car, because for some reason a Crown Victoria can travel at 200+. Whether it be a gas station pump ignited, or the sign onto of a donut shop taken down, those cops took the bait like a moth to a lightbulb, and you would 9/10 times get away because of that.

The Speed Breaker also revolutionized the way you play. This you HAD to use strategically, or it could completely backfire on you in the end of it all. You’d end up scrubbing off 80% of your speed entering a corner with the pursuit breaker on, and the other AI would effectively use that opportunity to overtake since you couldn’t accelerate fast enough. Another instance is avoiding traffic by quickly enabling and disabling the breaker. Problem with that is you’ll end up in an uncontrollable skid and your front end is gonna face the opposite direction of where you need to be.

Man I miss the days when games were hard like this.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 : Stopping Time and Predicting the Future.

Some of you may remember this, some of you may not. For those who don’t, allow me to explain. Hot Pursuit 2 had a function where you could turn your car into a giant fireball and have you fast forward in time 5 seconds to see if there’s a sharp corner or a police roadblock coming up in your way.

Also you were able to freeze time and do a 360 degree camera pan around your vehicle. What use it provides I don’t know, but it’s something I suppose. As Doug DeMuro would say, “Another one of it’s weird design quirks.”

Not much to say on this one.

Conclusion

I didn’t include a video for any of these because it would’ve been painstakingly difficult to get a video of each game, and some features you can’t even google and they’ll pop up. Hopefully you guys got another good read out of this.

Enjoy.