11 Old Racing Game Features You Miss Most

1. Used car garage

Here’s what sparked this community question. In the older Gran Turismo games there was a used car dealership - it was fun to keep checking it and it added a bit of variety. It’s a real shame it hasn’t featured in more recent installments.

Split screen was such a simple but enjoyable way of competing with your friends, but a lot of new racing games are focusing on online multiplayer, rather than off-line split screen features. It’s a big shame and limits the kind of multiplayer racing you can do.

3. Free roaming

The example here is Project Gotham Racing 2, Daniel says: “The ability to walk freely around the autoshow in PGR 2. I probably spent more time walking around here than actually racing.”

Current games usually look for sleek car menus and smart graphics, compared to small but enjoyable features like this.

This was a feature in Need For Speed Underground 2, adding to the whole performance customisation feature on offer in the game – so you could change tuning setups and get performance statistics.

5. Having to work for it

This is a pretty broad one but it’s so true. Older games definitely featured more unlockable content, so top cars and supercars were out of bounds until you achieved certain things or got to a specific level.

That’s not really the case in most modern games; you’re given free choice of even the most powerful and exotic cars available. It takes a little away from the story of the game and the sense of achievement.

6. Building your own team

There’s always something really cool about a game giving you the chance to build your own race team up, like in the original Race Driver: Grid game from Codemasters. This kind of involvement and customisation is rare in modern games and adds a whole new level of immersion and personalisation to the experience.

7. Simple Mario Kart circuits

It’s fun to see the Mario Kart map creators going all out with wacky stuff but sometimes the best tracks are the simple ones. We’re talking about the sort of circuit where there’s no going upside down or underwater - it’s just a track and maybe a few obstacles to keep things interesting.

8. Trim changes

As Musclecarlover7 said in reply to this suggestion, being able to customise more things on a car like the trim and interior colours adds a real sense of ownership to racing games. Test Drive Unlimited 2 is the example used for this one, adding a whole new bit of customisation to the cars – the inside is important too, not just the outside of the cars.

9. Appropriate pricing

This is a bug bear of mine and, it seems, quite a few people too. When I saw this comment I immediately thought “hell yes”. More modern games make prices for even basic cars way too expensive.

10. Sending cars to friends

While this feature was probably not immensely popular or regularly used by many gamers, it was a nice extra to have. Being able to send cars across to friends (which I used to do in Forza Motorsport 4) was a way of sharing the gaming experience, in some cases helping each other and adding a sense of community to the games.

In Forza 4 gamers could actually play their own version of the epic Top Gear Car Football (or soccer, however you say it where you’re from). It was a fun little feature and was something different to the usual racing too.

You can see all of the suggestions on the community question post here.