Racing games. They are the marmite of the gaming world. People either love or they hate them. To truly appreciate and enjoy racing games you need to enjoy racing, period, whether it’s Formula One, MotoGP or even Lawnmower Demolition Derby. If you can’t understand why people love to drive “round and round” in circles for “hours on end”, then you’re probably someone who wouldn’t appreciate a racing game.

I love them. Always have. Ever since I was a wee lad I had a growing fascination with speed and big, powerful engines strapped to a few wheels and a bit of bodywork. Racing games then were a natural progression for me. I used to watch my big brother play Revs Plus on our Speccy, and Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix Simulator on the C64 (the latter being one of my all time favourite racers).

PCs are not renowned for their racing genre. Consoles hold that accolade for some reason, probably due to their pick-up-and-play nature. We 'mature' gamers who own PCs tend to go for more grown-up game genres such as Real Time Strategy, Role-Playing and, well, violent First Person Shooters (well, senseless violence is mature, right?). It almost looks that, aside from the odd, ported release from time to time, the PC racing genre is flat on its back.

The PC modding and racing community stands proud, and takes the genre to a whole new level. You can download a gazillion user created cars, liveries and tracks for GTR and its brethren, and it isn’t too difficult to start designing your own. Simbin were also kind enough to release all the official car templates, so painting your favourite car in your own style of blancmange pink with neon-yellow livery is simply a case of firing up Photoshop and going wild.

You can also import cars and tracks from previous Simbin racers, such as GT Legends. There’s even an F1 mod for it, created by GTR modders Po911 and Tno (not their real names, I’m sure), which actually works very well, aside from a few small viewing issues. I’m sure the next version will have ironed these niggles out. This level of modding, and such an organised and active community helps the longevity of the game, and sticks a couple of driving gloved fingers up at the console racing community in the process. It’s a PC petrol head’s dream.

Not that I would ever claim to be a petrol head - I leave that title to my brother, who spends most of his spare time underneath the bonnet of his TVR. My colleague at work is also obsessed. He'll spend hour after hour playing GTR Evolution, hurtling around Nordschleife in his GT40, tweaking every other lap until he can shave a thousandth of a second off his already incredibly fast lap time. He has attained a level of patience that 

I will never understand.

I prefer the more arcade style of racing. Games such as Burnout and Need For Speed really get me going. The faster and more insane it is, the better. I like to throw cars sideways into corners at silly speeds and use barriers and other road users as make-shift brakes. Test Drive Unlimited fills these primitive urges nicely.

You can drive practically every desirable supercar and superbike there is. Okay, a slight exaggeration, but well over 40 cars to start with plus a couple of bikes, and another 40-odd cars are available to you if you purchase the Mega Car Pack. Of course, you have to work for them though, by attempting varying missions and competing in races. It takes quite some time and serious effort to afford many beautiful houses and cars, without cheating, anyway.

I actually got bored of the missions a long time ago, and fixed event racing can ultimately become really boring as opposed to free-roam street racing. So whenever I head out in TDU, it's usually to bomb around the countryside as fast as possible for a while before heading up to the North West Car Park, to meet up with my colleague and other likeminded speed-freaks.

It’s almost like a Tesco car park on a Friday night. We all meet up, chat a while, sort out the tunes before setting a marker somewhere beautiful on the map. The intention is always there too –cruise somewhere at a reasonable pace in a convoy, get there, take a few pics, then cruise back – except it never happens. It only takes a few miles, but someone will get it in their head that 150MPH is far too sedate, and accelerate away from the convoy, thus causing everyone else to follow suit. Admittedly, it’s usually me!

So, it all goes a bit NASCAR, except with more corners, and certainly more body contact, for another hour or so, before even that becomes a tad stale. That’s generally around the time where we decide to head down to the Oahu Raceway and put some laps in. It isn't uncommon to then drive 30 or 40 laps, pulling over occasionally when nature calls, or when you simply need to blink.

For a game that was ported (quite badly) to the PC, nearly three years ago, it still stands up as a great blast of a racer, and still gives some of these cheeky new upstarts a good run for their money (that's YOU, Fuel!). Okay, the graphics are showing a little age now (they weren’t all that cutting edge at release), and it does suffer from the most bizarre bugs. But it’s all forgivable when you’re cruising at 250mph on a Hawaiian road in beautiful sunshine, with your favourite Rolling Stones track blasting out of the speakers, especially with your mate alongside you in his favourite supercar.

What's even nicer is that the Gamespy servers they use are still up and running, even if they are a little flaky from time-to-time. This game was actually the reason I bought a Logitech G25 racing wheel, and almost immediately after, a racing seat setup. I probably wouldn’t still play the game without it. There is talk of a new TDU, but unfortunately, that's all it is, nothing more but loose talk. Hopefully soon though, we'll have even more real roads to drive on, and even more beautiful cars (here’s hoping for a Veyron)!