[STEAM] I went back to a classic racing game, and I finally realized what made it so good

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NFS franchise, this began with Underground—with throwaway AI personas, very short events, little to no continuity between the competitions, and, most annoyingly, always starting from the back and having to work your way through a pack.

Sue me for expecting a bit of realism from the racing part of an arcade racer, but always starting at the back is stupid, or at least that's what it felt like to teenager me. Hello? Qualification, earlier tournament results, prestige, anything? Or even if it were random, at least sometimes it should shuffle me higher up the order? It was somewhere between ludonarrative dissonance and "let me run over the designers with my virtual car." And that was before they tried to tell terrible stories in these games. Oh, don't get me started on those.

Pulling away, then getting reeled back in again

All this was a big part of why I slowly drifted away from racing games, at least after the well of

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and late-night rally binges (and TrackMania sessions) dried up. (The only way I could stomach anything more simulation-y was to play it with friends.) Oddly enough, I did pick up the habit of watching Gran Turismo YouTubers, and they gave me a new appreciation for actual racecraft. Not that I'd ever try to replicate it, no, sir, those walls are still magnetic, and the roads are still too narrow, after all—but sometimes, I do get a hankering for a quick race or two nowadays, and I boot up something random like Grid Autosport from 2014.

And then, one night, I thought I'd go back to the original Race Driver: Grid from 2006, one of our jolly multiplayer haunts. I never played too much of the solo campaign—the design choices discussed above made it quite boring for me, after all—but hey, maybe it would be a bit of fun?

Turns out, it was a lot of fun, at least for a while.

Now, as a boring adult with no designs for "doing well" in racing games, I can see the appeal of this approach. A breakneck rush through the pack, desperate divebombs and terrifying turns, new cars and new surroundings over and over again. Ian Livingstone's excellent soundtrack also adds a lot to the experience, even if it only plays on very special occasions, and the radio chatter of the engineer and my teammate, however bland, sort of actually makes things feel more alive.

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It also helps that the game eschewed a bit of realism for style, with exaggerated golden sun rays and a yellow tint over the whole world that evokes Deus Ex: Human Revolution somewhat, meaning it hasn't been ravaged by time as much as it could have been graphics-wise. Don't get me wrong, there are definite shortcomings—like, hello, I can see that the car in my peripheral vision doesn't have its wheelspin animated—but am I going to care, having grown up with MS-DOS prompts and crunchy pixel graphics? I was there when this game was on the cutting edge.

Going back from a later GRID game, the handling is quite forgiving but still not as much as some of the absolute arcade classics, making for a good mix for someone as incompetent as myself. But even if it were just nostalgia goggles, others are looking through them, too, saying that

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, that it is a bona fide Codemasters classic from an era gone by.

Here's the kicker, though: you can't buy it on digital storefronts anymore. It was delisted at the end of 2016 from most major platforms, and while the series still lives on, it never again hit this blend that seemed to work so well all along and one that I only just now got to appreciate to the fullest. So I, for one, will be sure to hold on to my Steam copy if I ever want to go back to a gold-tinted morning in Le Mans, preferably at 400 kilometers an hour.

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