This is one of the top racing games for the PC that assumes a level of familiarity with rally racing and doesn’t hold a player’s hand through many tutorial explanations of the concepts, so new players who are not well-versed in the car-world may struggle at the beginning. The races are long distance and test the driver’s ability to consistently push a car to its limits, but to also know the limits and work near their maximums, through rough terrain and over a long period of time.ĭirt Rally 2.0 by Codemasters is a real rally-aficionado's simulation. Unlike NASCAR or track-racing, rally racing takes place on real roads and in off-road, dirt-road environments.Ī rally car is built off of the frame of a sports car you could buy at your local dealership, and in order to qualify for rally-racing it must pass normal emissions testing and carry legal registration and insurance.

The idea is that rally cars are performance and durability tweaked to be modified production-model vehicles, but must remain street-legal. Rally racing is a part of the car-racing subculture that is as much about the race as it is the specs and performance of the vehicle. So buckle your seatbelt, fire up the ignition, and roll on up to the starting line: Here are a few of the best racing games for PC available now. And the industry puts out a steady stream of solid titles to service them. While most driving simulators for the PC come with standard controller and keyboard mapping, racing game enthusiasts are prone to trick out expensive rigs with specialized force-feedback steering wheels, pedals, and shifters that are often as expensive as the PC that runs the software. Get from the start to the finish and be the first one to do it.

The objective remains the same, no matter what the plot twists or details, settings or vehicles may be. PC racing games offer a prime and essential form of competition: easy to understand, but hard to master. They might not be the big, triple-A (AAA) franchises of the gaming world, but the genre has loyal devotees. Racing games have been a part of the tapestry and catalog of computer gaming ever since a constant, reliable stand-by and part of every library of games for every system ever made. It’s a steadfast constant from platform to platform, console to console, and with computers and computer gaming as it has developed and grown in processing power.įrom humble beginnings to the current moment, it’s a genre of games that is often overlooked and has, almost ironically, never been exactly “first place” in the line-up, but one that always shows in the mid-tiers.Īfter Pong, Atari’s second-ever game was a racing game called Space Race, created back in 1973: the Neolithic era of video games. In the assembled history of video and electronic gaming, there is a genre that is omnipresent throughout.

Car games for pc