Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

I mentioned recently an unsuitability for playing ‘proper’ racing games, with modern simulation and sim-adjacent games being so effective at conveying a sense of danger that a nervous real-life driver might find themselves lacking the nerve to really hit the best lap times.

A couple of years ago I decided to fire up one of Codemasters’ Formula 1 titles that had accrued in my backlog without ever being touched, so that I may at least continue my long-running tradition of repeatedly practising the first race of a Grand Prix season before abandoning it forever.

But they’ve made these games better and more accessible to idiots like me, now, and so with some of the dummy-proof aids turned on, I made it through quite a few rounds with some success.

Note the helpful green arrows on the road.

Once the initial sense of pride and self-satisfaction subsided, however, it increasingly felt like a hollow experience. Without the aids turned on, I’d have no chance and give up, as I had before; but with them, I didn’t really feel as if I was participating in the ultimate racing competition. Or, to put it another way: I could never be a Formula 1 driver, so any game that makes me feel like I could is somehow fatally compromised.

As it turns out, F1 2018 eventually proved too difficult once I got to the street circuits like Singapore, where a slight misjudgement puts you into a wall, and I reverted to my habit of giving up as soon as it got tricky, while giving kudos to the game for still having that capacity, despite all its friendly assistance.

The feeling that you’re not in total control is, I think, what removes a sense of involvement. Strangely, arcade driving games have always been the ones that have made me feel like I’m racing closest to the edge, even if they’re so simple they can be played with the four cursor keys if needed.

4D Sports: Driving (or Stunts) was the first racer to ever make me care about timed challenges, and using the construction kit to build some kind of semi-impossible monstrosity before seeing who could complete it in the fastest possible time was a regular theme of a number of super-cool gaming get-togethers during the 90s.

The track…

But the greatest personal obsession was ‘Default’ – the track which would load at the start of each new game, unless you changed it [So the ‘default’ one, then? – FFG Reader]. A strangely narrow loop with multiple jumps on either side, it seemed like a strange layout for a developer to choose, although a friend later claimed to be the author, replacing the original with his own design on a copy of the game that was later widely circulated through unofficial means.

It should be possible, with some digging, to find out if this is true or not, but really, I don’t want to know. The copy of Stunts that I have on my HD is the same one I had back in the 90s, transferred over across multiple PCs, and complete with saved tracks, lap times and even replays that my teenage self thought were worth saving. This is my reality: I’m going to leave the actual facts out of this.

At one point, ‘Default’ acted as a kind of personal Top Gear test track to validate the performance of the various cars available (a roster which at the time seemed massive, but upon further inspection apparently totalled a mere 11), and seeing what times could be achieved with each. (It was the 90s, ok? You sort of had to make your own fun.)

There was no doubt regarding what the best car was, though, and soon these tests morphed into more straightforward ‘what is the fastest possible time that you can do with the Porsche March Indy’ territory.

The car…

At first, times under a minute seemed tricky to achieve, before seconds and fragments of seconds were shaved off through frenzied sessions of repeated attempts at the same track in the same car.

Sometimes things would go wrong and you weren’t quite sure why: little quirks on the first set of jumps would mean occasionally you’d fly through the middle of an open bridge and smash into the base below, or encounter that bug where the front of the car would hit a ramp and propel you hundreds of miles straight up in the air.

But eventually the process was honed down to a fine art, with little details becoming crucial: move to the centre of the track as soon as possible; make sure you bring the revs down in the air as you’re flying towards that first turn; attack the corners but don’t spin out; if you’re not under X time by this point, then quit and start again.

The time…

Revisiting that same experience all these years later and trying to beat my old times, I was left with the feeling that, despite the rudimentary graphics, controls and handling, I was thinking more like an F1 driver than in any actual F1 game.

With complete confidence in my ability to do the basics, the instincts associated with real racing – concentration, fearlessness, ruthlessness, perfectionism – could come to the fore. Even if it was only in a daft old racer with bumblebee engine notes and reality-defying jumps, on a track that may or may not have been designed by a 14-year-old in the mid-90s.