I’m quite a big fan of racing games, but recently, I don’t honestly feel there’s been all that much to get excited about. While the likes of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing are all pretty good games, there’s just something about doing laps of a circuit that I don’t find all that exciting.

I remember when The Need for Speed first came out, I thought it was fantastic. To me, fast cars mean driving on roads, with traffic and cops to contend with – before I ever owned a PC, I used to love playing Test Drive 2 on my friend’s Dad’s machine. Of course, in both of those games, you were only ever really driving in a straight line, but the illusion of being free to drive on public roads worked nevertheless.

Unfortunately, both the Test Drive and Need for Speed series went off the boil, and produced some sub-standard (in the case of the former) and gimmicky (in the case of the latter) sequels and follow-ups that never quite recaptured the feeling of their respective high points.

Recently though, I’ve been playing the latest TD game, Test Drive Unlimited – and it’s quite good, too. Of course, my PC couldn’t possibly handle the Windows version, so my PS2 has to come creaking into action. The developers have actually done a pretty good job in squeezing it onto Sony’s aging console – and although they’ve had to cut some corners, it looks pretty good and runs smoothly. The PC version looks even better, though.

Anyway, you’re given the freedom of Hawaii to drive around and pretty much do as you please. To progress, you obviously need to start getting involved in races and earning money to upgrade your car, but if you don’t want to do that, you can just, well, drive. It’s like GTA without the guns and a more realistic driving model, or Midtown Madness with wide-open spaces…

Hello everybody, and welcome to our newest feature, the FFG journal.

Some time ago now, in a bid to broaden the scope of the site beyond that of a sporadically-updated review site, we decided to include other general articles about gaming. Unfortunately, as regular visitors to the site (if there are any) will have noticed, we haven’t been able to keep up with new content for this section as much as we’d have liked. Aside from a few galleries and our genre history features, some of the other articles generally amount to semi-topical rambling about, er, something or other vaguely related to old games.

Trouble is, once a bit of time has passed, some of these articles don’t seem so relevant (or coherent) as they might have done (at least to the author) when they were written, yet they remain on the site, loitering like a slightly embarrassing relative. And if they ever drift into dementia, sometimes I have to pay Dr. Stoo to kill them off altogether.

Anyway, rather than worrying about whether a thought is worth turning into an article for the site, writing it and then wanting to take it down later, we thought we’d give this a try instead, posting our more disposable gaming thoughts whenever the hell we feel like it.

We’ll be mentioning old games on here, of course, but expect to see posts about newer titles in the world of PC and console gaming, emulation, soundtracks, as well as more general ranting about this and that.

Hope you like it – feedback is always welcome, preferably directly under the post you want to comment on (er, I think that’s how these new-fangled things are supposed to work)…