TORCS - The Open Racing Car Simulator (2001) - Every PC Rally Game
0TORCS - The Open Racing Car Simulator by TORCS Team, 2001.
Pre-dating rFactor by several years, TORCS is, as the name suggests, and open racing car simulator, meaning anyone can add to it, or fork it into a new project. Still available from http://torcs.sourceforge.net/, this game features a number of dirt/mixed tracks, in amongst a collection of race circuits, road tracks and ovals.
There are a number of rally cars in the game, which seem to have been ported in from somewhere else (I've seen a mention that some came from Mobil 1 Rally Championship, via a mod for Need For Speed: High Stakes/Road Challenge), but some of their textures remind me of V-Rally games. I've also included the Alpine A110, which is technically a road racing car in the game, but it had a rally version in real life, and I wanted a bit of variety!
It's worth mentioning that the in-car cockpits are all a horribly blurry mess (with no animation on the steering wheel), though you can race from bonnet cam to alleviate this a bit. Car sounds are a mixed bag too, generally pretty average.
Track quality varies a lot, with some being very simple hand crafted efforts. The penultimate track shown in this clip seems to have an issue with the background not quite being in sync, which is a bit off-putting!
Car handling is more focused on track racing (against other cars), so there's no handbrake, which compromises the rally experience a lot. The time of day and weather also aren't changeable, so it's a bit limited on that front. But it's nice to see I could run my Logitech G920 steering wheel on a game from 2001, without too much drama!
Note: I switch to the full simulation interface when in-car; the external shots use the "arcade" interface, without the big dials overlapping the car. The TV camera is me playing the game realtime, as it doesn't appear to have a replay mode, which is why my driving is pretty awful in those clips! Also, if you merely touch a wall your lap time is invalidated, so it's a hard game!
This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU
Other Videos By VirtuaIceMan
Other Statistics
TORCS Statistics For VirtuaIceMan
Currently, VirtuaIceMan has 2,397 views for TORCS across 1 video. Less than an hour worth of TORCS videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.16% of the total video content that VirtuaIceMan has uploaded to YouTube.