My sim racing obsession comes and goes. I might go months without doing a single race, then jump back in and spend way too many hours on it, to the point of not getting enough sleep. (Most of my hobbies have this effect, actually.) The newer games are cool, and look amazing, but often times I find myself not getting drawn in as much by them. Assetto Corsa, the Project Cars series, even rFactor 2...they're all just missing...something. I think the most fun I've had with a newer game is BeamNG.Drive, which is not even a racing game, but a vehicle physics and crash simulator, but anyway...I occasionally go back to the classics.
rFactor 1 is a remarkable example of the value of user-generated content. The content provided by the developers is somewhat generic and boring, but the almost endless mods for the game really bring it to life. To a certain point, it's possible to imagine not needing any other game but this one. And yet, for one reason or another, I inevitably tire of this as well. Probably because loading too many mods makes the menu slow and some tracks are of questionable quality, especially in the AI department. Nevertheless, I still have a great deal of appreciation for this game. It's the spiritual sequel to the first PC racing game I really got sucked into: Sports Car GT.
Developed by the same folks as rFactor, but several years earlier, Sports Car GT was very much the same kind of "easily modded" game, but even more so. For example, a single text file held all of the car's relevant stats, and tools were created by the community to make it easy to tweak the engine, suspension, and aero numbers. For that matter, opening up the car's 3D files was rather easy as well, with multiple programs capable of modifying and converting them. I put several 3D models from other games into Sports Car GT myself back in the early 2000s. However, unlike rFactor in my opinion, the base content was also a draw of Sports Car GT. The late-90s sports car world was weird, and this game doesn't perfectly encapsulate it, but it does have some legendary cars like the Panoz GTR-1 and Mclaren F1, some interesting yet less famous cars like the Mosler and the Lister Storm, all the way down to GT2 and GT3 BMWs and Porsches. I managed to get this game to work on my modern PC, and it still holds up in a weird way. I think I like it more with a controller than a wheel, but maybe that's because I used to play it with a flight stick. This game is like a warm nostalgic glass of hot cocoa. I have a huge amount of mods for this game stashed in my cloud storage, just because most of the websites are gone nowadays.
On a slightly different note, but not really, Race 07 is one of those games that is better than it has any right to be. It's a licensed game for the WTCC, but it's no throwaway as licensed games often are. In fact, it runs on the same physics engine as rFactor, though tweaked by the developers for this particular application. It also has a bunch of expansions, some of which were sold as standalone games, but all of which tie into Race 07 if you buy them on Steam. They're old enough that Steam doesn't really treat them like modern DLC, so it's a bit confusing, but once you install them all, you can access them from the Race 07 menu. There's GT cars and classics and open-wheel, but this game to me is really about touring cars. WTCC and STCC cars across several seasons all can race together, and they're a lot of fun. I think this game is what made me realize front-wheel drive doesn't have to be boring.
I've played with some mods for Race 07 in the past, but somehow never got around to the Supertouring mod. This was a major oversight, as this mod is not only well-made but has been continually updated by the creator. It's a really sweet encapsulation of 90s touring cars, focused on the BTCC and featuring the famous Volvo wagons, the multitude of BMWs, the Renaults and Hondas and Nissans and Peugeots and Vauxhalls, and of course, my favorite, the Mondeos. There's enough cars for full seasons from 95 to 2000, as well as cars from 91-94 and a few others.
Where am I going with this? I don't know. I just like old racing games that hold up better than they have a right to.
