Progression in racing games (possible rose tinted content)

[lordrobs]

I remember when I were a boy sitting playing Gran Turismo spending hours racing around in a Honda Beat or Toyota Vitz saving up for a sports suspension kit or performance air filter. Slowly upgrading my cars and building up a car collection. It was awesome.

Today it seems that most racing games go along the lines of - huge selection of cars at your disposal from race one and after race 1 "You've been awarded a McLaren P1". This is rubbish.

Are there any games out there that still respect the grind of the OG racers? I recently started playing Forza 7 and I seem to get 2 fully modified cars for every 4 races I complete. As such I lose interest real quick. I guess this is a result of the main selling point of modern racers being a car list with silly numbers of cars available?

Just to finish off my trip down memory lane I'm going to give an honourable mention to Import Tuner Challenge. The game was flawed in many ways but the car progression was spot on. I competed that game with three cars. The first two were tweaked, upgraded and improved throughout my journey through the game. The last... well that was a buy and mod straight away job because no amount of tweaking could get enough performance out of my S15 for the last couple of races.

 

[lordrobs]

MSR was the best racer ever

I'd honestly put MSR way up there with my favourite games ever.

I lost track of when I fell out of love with Forza but 4 sounds about right. The automatic "homologation" of the prize cars in the new one is horrible. I know I can manually "upgrade" the car back to stock and fiddle with it myself but it just feels wrong and because the credits are dished out like crazy I can just max out a car on a whim. I'd have to have been playing GT for about 6 months to have that level of credits, I've been playing Forza on and (mainly) off for about a week!