As a kid I loved TOCA2, it was THE perfect racing game because it had everything. It felt brilliant, the handling was out of this world. Not just the BTCC cars, my favourite was probably the Formula Ford which was so much fun to slide around Silverstone. It was the best racing game ever, and I remember being desperate for TOCA 3.
And it never came. Instead we got TOCA World Touring Cars and I hated it, because it was all wrong. Firstly the handling was different, you could no longer lose the rear end by cornering too hard, which took away the jeopardy. The liveries were fictional, it no longer had that authenticity, lots of the British tracks were gone, I was gutted with it, horrible sequel and not what I wanted at all.
But I revisited it a year or two ago and was amazed at how advanced it was for a PS1 game. Even visually - I bloody hate the look of most PS1 games these days, they just look terrible, but TWTC is so solid, the draw distance is good, the frame rate is good, it handles all those cars on track at once with weather, full damage etc, it still has qualifying, pit stops, strategies, basically takes all that was good shout TOCA 2 and takes it global to all these different regional championships with their own flavour. It’s an insanely good achievement.
I still maintain TOCA2 is better, or at least I prefer it. The handling isn’t as good, the actual driving feel isn’t as good. But everything around it was remarkable what they managed to do with it and you can see ideas in this game that carried forward into GRID games to this day.
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I'll need to take a look at that Super Touring business from Furi.
