The third title in Microsoft’s flashy yet smart driving series offers a fresh landscape and a host of fresh features – and does it all with a smile Driving games used to matter. Like,really matter. When the original PlayStation was launched against Sega’s Saturn almost 22 years ago, the two consoles were judged on their respective racing sims: Ridge Racer and Daytona USA. Before fighting games took over, and these were the standard bearers of polygonal visuals that introduced players to the concept of genuine-time graphics rendered in three dimensions. Since then,at the accessible halt of the driving sim genre, we’ve had the brilliant Burnout, or the endlessly reconfigured Need for Speed,the innovative Test Drive Unlimited and the gorgeous Project Gotham Racing – all venerated in their time. But over the last few years, interest in the arcade racer has waned, and a state of affairs symbolised by the unhappy closure of weird Creations in 2011,a British studio that truly understood how to make flashy, beautiful driving games for the mainstream market.
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Source: theguardian.com