There are lots of racing games out on the market today, with their Advanced games engines and graphics, but what really makes a good Racing Simulator? Simple, make the game as close to the real thing as possible. It sounds very but it isn't, games developers have been trying for many years namely the crew from the Gran Turismo series, and thats where my love for Racing Simulators started.

Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo was a great series but it still lacked important aspects of Simulation, the cars seemed to be glued to the road, you could not get the cars to oversteer properly which I believe to be the most important part of what makes a great game. The latest Instalement "Gran Turismo 5" still suffers from the same problem, you don't have the real Understeering feel of a car with so much power and you can still smash into the walls in the corners for better laptimes. Gran Turismo was well known for its Replays with its stunning graphics but thats where it ended. The Gran Turismo cars also sounded terrible, which lead me to look for an alternative Racing simulator "LFS".

Live for speed

LFS has been around for many years but has failed to progress with the times, it does have some of the best Racing simulation physics, but lacks in too many other areas. The Graphics and sounds are too outdated and ruin the entire feel of the game for me. They also dont have licenses for Car manufactorers so you end up with lots of unknown cars. Then Rfactor came along.

Rfactor

 GTR2

GTR2 has also been around for a while and i think it hit the right spot, it is a very agressive game to play. The Graphics are reasonable and the engines sounds are great.  You can tell they have put alot of effort into the car modeling and the physics. This is a very difficult game to play, it requires alot of attention to get these beasts around the track without spinning off to your death. It uses the same game engine as GT legends and runs really smoothe, it is very easy on hardware so most people can run it.

GT Legends

GT Legends is my favorite for a few reasons, It has the best physics of the bunch and the level of detail on the dashboards is beautiful. You can Muscle a classic Racing car around the track all day and enjoy it, the level or oversteer and understeer feels just right. The Ai in the game is the best I have come accross, it is so hard to keep the lead and you feel as if your racing a good player not a Bot. If you spin out on a corner it will take you a good 2 laps to ragain your position  so you must maintain a high level of consentration.

The selection of cars is perfect, giving you all types of styles of racing and each car has its strengths and weaknesess, unlike most games where if a car lacks power you simply don't want to drive it, where as in GTL I could happily drive a Ford Cortina against some bigger V8's due to its cornering and breaking power.

Graphics wise It is beutiful to look at, it might lack the complex shaders of later games but still looks stunning as you can see in the picture above, the sounds of the mighty Classic V8's will get anyone excited, Big Block carberretor V8's have a raw and aggresive sound which will put a smile on your face everytime you press down on the accelerator.

I would reccomend GTL if you are a racing sim fan and I'm sure you will agree there is something really special about this games which makes me give it a 9.5/10.

Some pictures of my setup