Player One Podcast

As I write this, the green flag has just dropped on the Rolex 24 hour race at Daytona, and thus, on the 2009 racing season. I caught a few of these American Grand Am (or Le Mans, whichever) races last year, and the drivers usually put on a really good show. I’m going to make sure to catch a few more of those this season.

Anyway, there is a gaming bent to this post. The 24 at Daytona reminded me about a great racing game from a generation ago – Test Drive Le Mans on the Dreamcast, and the PlayStation 2 re-release, Le Mans 24 Hours.

I remember first hearing about the game back during my EGM days, and thinking Infogrames (the French publisher that eventually became the new Atari) was completely nuts. NASCAR and F1 are generally the only licensed racing leagues you can hope to release to any sort of success. But basing an entire game on a single, 24 hour race? How could that possibly work out?

Well, that’s not totally true. Test Drive Le Mans was really a series of championship seasons across various, licensed tracks, along with the ability to run the 24 hours of Le Mans if you so desired. And yes, the option to run the real-time, 24 hour race was in there.

And it was designed really well, too. With a full day and night cycle, as well as the option for random weather changes, the whole thing felt very authentic. Plus you could save your game every time you pitted, which made the whole thing quite manageable.

The key thing to note, though, is that the game was just a hell of a lot of fun to play. The graphics were great for the time, with some very impressive lighting and that shiny, metallic look a lot of us came to expect from Dreamcast racers. They don’t hold up incredibly well today, but the game still has a pretty unique look.

The reason I remember this game so well, though, is because it was awarded EGM’s Racing Game of the Year back in 2000 (I think that was the year, anyway). That and it seemed like the cornerstone of a series of quite enjoyable racers to come out of Infogrames. While they never had an amazing reputation, a lot of racing fans were really well-served by Infogrames and some of their developers over the previous generation. Places like Melbourne House, Ratbag, and Monster Games in particular. The publisher released great, grass-roots style racing games that covered World of Outlaws Sprint cars, dirt-track stock car racing, great rally racing, and even NASCAR. Even destruction derby style racing (along with figure 8 racing and all that sort of stuff) was well served by Test Drive: Eve of Destruction.

So if you’re a racing fan, you could do worse than looking up some of Infogrames’ stuff on the PlayStation 2.

Greg Sewart Video Games dreamcast, playstation 2, racing, test drive