Race to win gamers' hearts

Why are there so many racing games and why are they so popular, wonders Daniel Etherington of BBCi Collective in his weekly games column.

Project Gotham offers immaculate realism

Racing, like shooting, is gaming at its most fundamental. It is all about skill, reaction times, competition and, ideally, fun.

The latter is a bit of an issue for me though. Frankly, racing games can be rather dull.

Maybe it is partly because I don't like cars in real life. They are ugly, dangerous and polluting beasts. And maybe because it is a genre I am not very good at.

All those Gran Tourismos and F1s and Motos and Daytonas leave me cold. There is something very dry and inorganic about all that hardcore fetishization of motor vehicles, something very boy-racer about being so concerned with RPMs and wotnot.

Do not get me wrong, I appreciate the quality of some of these games. Project Gotham Racing 2 is impressive.

But much of the appreciation of that game comes more from the environments - the immaculately realised cites of Florence, Hong Kong - than the actual play itself, which has a quality play mechanic but is not something I could do indefinitely without it feeling repetitive.

Frantic antics

The racing genre can become more interesting where developers get over that obsession with realism.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! finely upholds the tradition of combining the challenge of hurtling round a racetrack in the best possible time, with energetic fun Discuss this story on BBCi Collective

Just look at the sci-fi trappings and ultra kinetics of F-Zero GX, the 2000AD flashbacks of Trickstyle, the frenetic antics of Re-Volt.

The Dreamcast and previously PC micro-machine racer, Re-Volt, is a case in point. It was not exactly a masterpiece, but it offered neat little blasts of silly, frantic antics.

And where are the best fun, frantic antics to be found? In Nintendo's Mario Kart games of course.

Despite the typical Technicolor cartoon visuals and the immediate sense of fun, the Mario Kart games are by no means lesser or easier than the sombre car racers with aspirations of photorealism and detailed recreations of known locations.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, the latest in the series that began in 1992 with Super Mario Kart on SNES, finely upholds the tradition of combining the challenge of hurtling round a racetrack in the best possible time, with energetic fun.

On the whole, however, Double Dash! is not a great departure from its forebears. It is a blissful multiplayer game, a neat package that captures the half-remembered glee of, say, a children's party.

Those more demanding of racing games may not be satisfied with another Mario Kart title. But if you like your racing with plenty of action and a light, humorous touch, Miyamoto's take is as reliably entertaining as ever.