Drivers, start your engines!

[Rhenna]

Could use some guidance and recommendations.

I'm considering buying a driving/racing sim for a distant relative for the holidays. This guy actually races Miata's as a member of some auto club at a track near his home. For reasons I won't get into, he has needed to dial back any sort of competitive driving, and I thought that he might be able to mitigate, (however slightly), this curtailment with a little bit of desktop driving over the Winter.

A few parameters:

1. He isn't currently, or ever was, any sort of hardcore gamer.
2. Keyboard and mouse only. (I'm thinking a somewhat relaxed, forgiving driving model. But, not too arcade-like.)
3. Platform consists of a dual-core Conroe, (2.2GHz?), 2Gb RAM, 256Mb X1650 Pro DX9 graphics, and WinXP Pro SP3.
4. Something I can actually find if it isn't a recent title. (Older titles are fine.) A Steam candidate would be perfectly OK.
5. Doesn't need to be teh awesome, just something reasonably decent and not too buggy.

Driving and racing games just aren't in my PC gaming experience. (Well, there was that stuff in Mafia, and I don't drive like the stereotypical woman in UT2k4 Onslaught. Or, for that matter, in Real-Life®.) There is a shop in what passes for a town around here that has some unopened Need For Speed jammies from, like, 1979. If I can stay sober long enough to drive, I'll see if I can gather some details in case any of those might be deemed worthwhile. I need to go into town anyway; I need bread, orange-juice and small-pistol primers.

Thanks in advance. And, again, not responsible for any imbedded links.

[Fatty]

If he's into rally, the Dirt series is pretty good. There's 3 of them so I don't think the first one is too demanding. For track racing, NFS: Shift would be a good one (It even has a Miata in it). It's Need for Speed's attempt at a racing sim, so it's kind of arcadey.

[RAY16]

If he's into rally, the Dirt series is pretty good. There's 3 of them so I don't think the first one is too demanding. For track racing, NFS: Shift would be a good one (It even has a Miata in it). It's Need for Speed's attempt at a racing sim, so it's kind of arcadey.

I'd say the first DiRT (http://www.fileplanet.com/177286/170000/fileinfo/DiRT-Demo) is the most demanding of the three because the EGO engine was pretty immature at that point—it didn't hit its stride until the release of GRID (http://www.fileplanet.com/186561/180000/fileinfo/GRID---v1.1-Demo). The EGO engine became heavily multi-threaded in DiRT 2 (http://www.fileplanet.com/207823/200000/fileinfo/DiRT-2-Demo) and 3 though, so those might not be the best choices either. Of course, there are demos of all of them except for 3 so you can try them out before spending any money. There are plenty of Colin McRae (http://www.fileplanet.com/2315/0/section/Colin-McRae-Rally-Series) games before DiRT that were designed for the PS2 (and if you go even further back, the PSX) and would run fine on an X1650. All of the Codemasters racing games have a pretty decent balance between sim and arcade and should be pretty playable on a keyboard with the assists turned on.

Another option for Rally is “Rallisport Challenge (http://www.fileplanet.com/116997/110000/fileinfo/RalliSport-Challenge-Trial)” by DICE. It was designed for the original Xbox and ported to the PC and had pretty good DX8 graphics for the time. Still looks alright all things considered, but does show its age. Pretty good simcade racer and should do fine on a keyboard.

As far as the Need for Speed series (http://www.fileplanet.com/2922/0/section/Need-for-Speed-Series) goes, the quality varies wildly across its history. NFS: Hot Pursuit, High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed were great and can still offer a fair amount of fun if you can get them running properly and can tolerate the really dated handling models and DirectX 6/7 graphics. The underground games are pretty good arcade racers if you turn off the in-game soundtracks and run your own music in the background and don't mind the perpetual night and wet streets. Once you get past the underground games you start getting into the 360/PS3 era of the series and will start having a hard time running them on an X1650.

Here's a summary of how I feel about the NFS games that should be playable on an X1650.

The Good

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Need for Speed: High Stakes
Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed
Need for Speed: Underground — Turn off the in-game soundtrack, run your own music, ignore ghetto factor.
Need for Speed: SHIFT 1 & 2 — Decent simcade racers, but they're probably way too demanding for an X1650 even on low settings. The physics model is also horrendously broken when you drive aggressively (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8FBH2wf6ck), which may have been fixed in the second game but I haven't played it enough to know.


The Bad (or just mediocre)

Need for Speed: Underground 2 — Same as its predecessor, with a shitty tacked-on open world element.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted — Didn't run great on hardware available on release, PC version is a port of the original Xbox version instead of 360 version, I don't like the handling model.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 — Inferior to the PS2 version.


The Ugly

Need for Speed: Carbon — No, just...no.