Virtual insanity

CHANCES are that if you like cars, you’re going to love this clip!

Aside from showcasing the awesome spectacle of seeing a Jaguar XJ220 (world’s fastest car, for about five minutes) take on a Lamborghini Cala (would have been the 1990s Gallardo, had the Italians not bottled it) in a high speed battle on public roads, I actually got seriously nostalgic after spotting this film on Youtube the other night.

It’s the very same clip which loaded up every time I fired up my favourite car racing game.

Because the rather more real thrill of punting a go-kart towards a pit wall or hurtling along a country road in a hot hatch is infinitely more enjoyable than firing up a PC or Playstation, I’d almost forgotten car racing games existed, but I’m glad they still do. I’m just ashamed to admit that – 15 years later – I’m still hopeless at almost all of them.

The problem with almost all racing games when I grew up in the Nineties is that barely any of them bore even the closest resemblance to the real thing; Lotus Challenge looked like an LSD-induced re-imagination of Tron, the Test Drive series looked like it’d been designed by a class of eight-year-olds and TOCA ’97 featured interior shots of a square hand changing gear. While the rest of you were out there weighing up whether an MGF was better than an MX-5, this is what I got lumbered with.

Gran Turismo was by and away the best technically but it took an eternity of not terribly realistic racing to buy and tune up the really nice motors, by which point every other teenager had discovered girls and the benefits of social lives. In fact the only game I actually enjoyed playing was Sega Rally, which was ancient but had the Lancia Integrale in it.

That was until Need For Speed, which technically is just as bad as the others when it comes to making a Ferrari F355 look like a Lego design, came out. Forget the later Underground rubbish and go for the retro novelty, particularly with the police pursuit option in Need for Speed III with its suspiciously easy getaways and quaint regionalised police “commentary” which make even the most hardcore drives feel as though they’re being narrated by Mr Chomondley-Warner.

But my absolute favourite is Need For Speed II, simply because it came with a short film to introduce the stunning fleet of Nineties supercars lined up to star in. If I had to spend a night with any of the old car racing video games, it’d be that one.

Only I don’t have to, because another bright spark has put all those movies onto Youtube, and if you click the video below and get past the Lambo/Jag race has clips for everything from the Lotus Esprit to the McLaren F1.

Enjoy...