Arcade Racer Vs Sim (Outrun Online Arcade/Need for Speed Shift - PS3)
30Which is better arcade racer or sim racer?
For me, it'd be arcade racer any day of the week. I've just never been able to get into sim racers, dating all the way back to the first Gran Turismo games. That's not to say sim racers are bad, they're just not for me. I don't want realistic driving physics that mean I need to slow to a crawl as I approach a corner, I want to powerslide around it at 200 mph. I also don't want to be presented with a million and one car tuning options at the start of a game, I just want to pick a car and start playing. Most importantly, I don't want that car to be some shitty hatchback I'm forced to use over and over again until I car earn a better car, I want to jump straight in as a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.
You might be wondering why I'm using Need for Speed Shift, when the aforementioned Gran Turismo is arguably the most high profile sim racing series around on the Playstation and the answer is simple... I have a demo of Need for Speed Shift on my PS3, I don't own any other sim games. I did at one time own both Gran Turismo 5 and Shift 2, but I have subsequently sold them both, because, as previously mentioned, I just don't enjoy these types of game (and I have genuinely tried to get into them. Honest). In fairness to Need for Speed Shift, there are parts of the game, particularly in the London stage, where you can really stick your foot down and the game does provide a real sense of speed (despite only running at 30 fps, compared to GT5's 60 fps). I think the car models and the stages themselves all look very good and on the whole I think it's a very nice looking game.
I've chosen Outrun Online Arcade to represent arcade racing games. Outrun 2/Coast 2 Coast/Online Arcade are probably my favourite arcade racing games of all time and Online Arcade is arguably the best looking version of all them, albeit a version with less content than the other games. Because of this, I've also used some footage from the Xbox versions of Outrun 2 and Coast 2 Coast (played on an Xbox 360 to upscale it), because there were a couple of stages from those games I wanted to use in this comparison that aren't in Online Arcade.
The idea that I had when approaching this comparison was that as Need for Speed Shift was starting off on a London based street circuit, I wanted to edit together several different stages from the Outrun games to make a 'City' based playthrough for the first part of the comparison. Starting on Sunny Beach (at night), the game moves to San Francisco, to New York, to New Joke City (From Daytona USA 2), to Las Vegas and then to Paris. As the second track, in Need for Speed Shift's demo is Spa, I wanted to try and use Outrun tracks that had a slightly more countryside-ish feel. The plan sort of became undone though when I realised that my Outrun city track actually lasted for a lot longer than the London track, so there is a bit of over lap between it and Spa. My plan for more rural type tracks to compare to Spa disappeared after about two stages and I ended up just sticking stages in that I thought looked cool.
If you're interested in finding out more about how arcade style and Sim racers differ there's an interesting thread over at the Rolling Start forum that discusses it:
http://www.rolling-start.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=404