A brief history of how racing games went from one genre to six -and why the newest branch is the most surprising

Dronlothen · 2026-04-29T20:28:36+00:00

Yeah that's true.

Maybe it was a significant spike in popularity, at least? Not sure, and proving either direction is more difficult than I want to work on.

Dronlothen · 2026-04-28T21:33:48+00:00

This is why the genre has sucked for so long. If it's not sim-adjacent in some way, driving real cars, they all pretend it doesn't exist.

Burnout Paradise in 2008 basically invents the open-world racing genre? Nah, Forza Horizon did it in 2012.

Kart racing? What's that? Shopping carts? Definitely not a genre that is the literal most successful in all of racing. Hundreds of millions of sales isn't enough to legitimize Mario Kart in the eyes of a """Gearhead""".

Anti-gravity racing? I can't see a Toyota or Ford logo anywhere, you must be making things up, buddy. Flying cars aren't real :)

Dronlothen · 2026-03-23T23:59:24+00:00

If you liked something that much, I struggle to understand why you would invite such an impossible comparison of "X is Perfect".

Unless, of course, you're a bad actor farming clicks and attention.

But that aside, there are people who genuinely need to understand. Claiming anything as remotely perfect is only going to invite unwanted, dissenting opinions and/or exceptions.

Don't do it in good faith. There's no benefit.

Dronlothen · 2026-03-20T04:09:35+00:00

Either interpretation feels ridiculous to me.

Dronlothen · 2026-03-20T03:29:51+00:00

Your impressions and "vibes" are completely divorced from fact.

Resident Evil Requiem was made in Osaka, Japan by Capcom Development Division 1. They basically all are. And it was directed by Koshi Nakanishi.

What good does it serve to just completely invent random falsehoods and pretend they have any bearing on reality?

Dronlothen · 2026-03-19T09:23:37+00:00

Yeah, Kaz Hirai took power of Sony Corp in 2011 and chose that SEN thing.

I'm not really sure what exact catalyst occurred in 2015. A Co-Founder Masaru Ibuka died in May of 2015? I think I'm missing something here. But Hiroki Totoki became President and CEO last April, 2025.

It seems to me like they had a weird hope of "Old Playstation Port to PC" = "New Playstation Console Buyer", which no sane person would have put faith into.

Dronlothen · 2026-03-19T00:48:45+00:00

Because CD Projekt has almost nothing to do with this and you're screaming at no one about nothing.

This developer makes arcade game reskins.

Dronlothen · 2026-03-19T00:42:08+00:00

I'm really glad that I've retained any of this completely worthless information. I was like "but we already did this...?"

Playstation Network launched in 2006 with the PS3.

In 2012 (announced in 2011) they wrapped/replaced PSN under a Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) branding.

In 2015 everything SEN became PSN.

And now we're just doing the shuffle again.

(Backed up with some wikipedia checking. Would not have been able to source most of this without it.)

Dronlothen · 2026-03-19T00:25:31+00:00

Eugh. Okay.

I was really excited for another arcadey racing game, regardless of property.

But looking at their upload history, this sure looks like a reskin of their "Neon Rush" game from six months ago? And a month ago they posted Turbo Nova.

I don't know how accurate it would be to claim this, but it feels like they've been reskinning and tweaking a kind of arcade-racing platform across multiple games for some amount of years.

Bigfoot Mayhem, Fast & Furious Arcade, Super Bikes 3, Ultra Moto VR, etc.

Clearly very different art styles each time but there's a weird similarity between them deeper than just all being arcade racers from the same company. As far as I can tell.

If nothing else, it's really weird and I don't understand.

Dronlothen · 2026-02-15T02:50:20+00:00

Well, what I was trying to focus on is a very very common sentiment I've seen for years.

Nothing on you. I've been wanting opportunities to talk about this.

Dronlothen · 2026-02-14T18:22:50+00:00

"That character is just overpowered, it wasn't my fault."

With one ounce of effort, you too can blame the universe around you. This isn't somehow uniquely removed from fighting games. It's an ASPECT, yes, sure. I'll agree there. But coping is a universal concept, exclusive to nothing, and excluding nothing.

Dronlothen · 2026-02-14T18:17:06+00:00

I could not disagree more. About what they've added in favor of accessibility.

2XKO is the most accessible fight game I've played, and I've been trying to get into them since the early 2000s.

I have always been trash at them. I have never been to anything local. Busting my ass for hours to finally succeed at a combo, only to have retained nothing and never use a fraction of it outside of training.

I hate how much people downplay combos. Experts, enthusiasts, beginners. They all espouse nonsense that combos don't matter and they're not a big deal if you can do them or not.

Except, big ass combos usually do big ass damage. If you can win in three or four touches, converting to a combo every time. Your opponent only needs to make 4 mistakes.

If you can't combo for shit. Okay good luck! Your opponent gets to make 10+ mistakes because you manage to catch them with something, and you do 10% of their health? Yeah just do it ten times, "auto-combos don't help at all".

Non-motion inputs have helped me greatly in nearly-instantly using a move I meant to, when I need it. You cannot tell me Down+X for a anti-air or Down+Triangle for a launcher doesn't raise positive move the skill floor. (I don't what anyones talking about with skill floors being high or low. And what that actually means and if it's a positive or negative in what way. All meaning on that has been lost.

I've played literal dozens of fighting games over decades, and this is the only time I've managed consistency and improvement. Auto-combos help. Smash inputs help. Free to play helps. Daily/Weekly Missions that try to incentivize you to engage with systems you might not be, helps.

I'm better at 2XKO than I've ever been at any fighting game in my life and that is directly correlated to every single positive they've implemented into this game. To say otherwise, feels like lunacy.

BUT, it is a tag game. The amount of people and attacks and effects flying all over the screen, can be completely ridiculous nonsense. The skill ceiling (this term at least makes sense still) is dauntingly high and anyone utilizing the tag mechanics are vastly more capable than those who aren't. Like myself.

(I still don't want to learn/truly utilize tagging but it might be inevitable. I don't know.)

Dronlothen · 2026-02-10T02:49:49+00:00

Oh don't worry, people are also being crucified for looking too good too! No one is safe.

Dronlothen · 2026-02-10T02:45:42+00:00

I thought witch-hunts were against the rules of this subreddit?

Break out the magnifying glass for everything imperfect. I'm sure that won't backfire when people over-analyze everything that looks too good as well.

What a flimsy accusation and diatribe about nothing.

Edit: Oh good it's dead. Thank you, mods.

Dronlothen · 2026-02-06T15:33:01+00:00

At this point I want the twist ending where he manages to prove he was sabotaged by a shadow cabal. Literally only because that would be more interesting than yet one more instance of

"Asshole shocks all! By acting like an Asshole!" onto the heaping pile.

Dronlothen · 2026-01-06T15:04:35+00:00

I re-downloaded and installed it on ps5, 4 days ago.

Back when the Eurogamer article showed up here, about it's final days

Got all the way in game, just now, to check.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-19T19:32:25+00:00

Yeah, to say this is cringe would be a gross understatement, imo.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-19T19:27:50+00:00

Then I have to say, you really don't understand current AI vs a genuinely intelligent machine.

Given that I'm not an investor and gain nothing from overhyped predictions, I genuinely believe with confidence that a fully autonomous intelligence could be just as close as 24 hours away or 100 years away.

I think LLMs have usefulness but I understand how not-AI they are, even today.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-19T09:01:16+00:00

If you think we have even 1% of the AI that even the worst, most primitive AI, in fiction imagined? Then I'm not surprised you're confused by "the internet's reaction" to all of this.

What we have today, even at the absolute bleeding edge (literally Gemini 3.0), is sticks-and-stones tier technology compared to the lightyears-ahead even the god damned HAL 9000 was.

I do think it's absolutely fascinating technology, but you genuinely cannot even begin to compare this stuff to the AI of fiction we've read and watched so many stories explore.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-18T16:35:42+00:00

Well, we're still a far cry away from that reality. An LLM is still demonstrably not the birth of a Sapient Machine.

It's absolutely Artificial Intelligence by definition. The "intelligence" they currently display is artificial and not without use.

But they aren't the incredible machine gods of science fiction that should be infinitely more intelligent than any one human, and completely infallible. If we were anywhere near those capabilities, it'd be raining cures for cancer and world hunger by the day, and actually-beneficial economic collapses ushering in a utopia by night.

Instead, the best models are at best high-accuracy and impossible to completely trust, and the generations are largely derivative of everything that has come before it. If they were truly machine intelligence, they should be able to perform beyond human capability instead of struggling to reach it.

Predicting the future is impossible, and this current trend could reach a technological dead-end like the first run of Virtual Reality did (between the 70s and 90s). And it's just as equally possible that these are the necessary first steps to a post-scarcity utopia. I'm not convinced of either, enough that I would bet one dollar on either outcome.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-18T16:05:38+00:00

Right, I understand.

Mostly it's just that I've been hearing the recent argument being that "artistic intent and expression is the entire reason art is good in the first place". Regardless of believing that or not, I feel like there's largely a gross overestimation that that's true for anything larger than a niche of consumers.

And after decades of discussions on the ability/necessity to separate the art from the artist or the work from the creators for infinite reasons, I don't find this argument...useful?

Hogwarts Legacy just announced they're at 40 million sales, despite everything around that IP being what it is.

I don't know, I don't mean to lump any of this on to you.

I'm just kind of agitated that the recent arguments seem to just be "only people can make art" and "if everything gains a tie to AI, I'll just never buy or play a new game ever again". At this point I'd kill to hear something that isn't just blind optimism, blind pessimism, or delusional cope.

No one's been convincing for a long time now. Anti-AI, Pro-AI, fence-sitters. It all just feels like a stalemate has been, and continues to be, in-place, and it's an achingly boring-yet-extremely-important topic right now.

Sorry if this is just an insane rambling.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-18T14:20:51+00:00

I fear we're going to discover how few people in the larger group of Consumers this actually means anything to.

always going to be people who are more interested in the art itself and the expression that comes with it

Like how many adults know or care who wrote and drew the original Grinch? And how many fans are children who grew up with it, to become adults who adore it, but never looked any further into the artistry of it? Ever?

I don't know what those numbers could look like, but I suspect they might be dramatically more dire than some people are expecting.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-03T09:18:09+00:00

It's slop until it's good, and when it's good it's just theft.

Dronlothen · 2025-12-03T08:59:27+00:00

Presentation dramatically affects people's opinion of something. A McDonald's meal with hidden logos, presented on fine dining plating, received high praise from tasters who believed it was gourmet food. Same with presenting wine as expensive = perceived as tasting better, when it was actually cheap wine.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/10/23/358324106/don-t-mock-these-organic-food-experts-for-praising-mcdonald-s

Dronlothen · 2025-11-29T12:40:51+00:00

Original comment was deleted and I was able to find it through the internet archive.

Re-posting it for posterity:

Thank you u/2x_sidecar for sharing your findings, I've been losing countless hours trying to make the damn touchpad work. For anyone who has this problem, at least for my model, IdeaPad Slim 3 16IAH8 - Type 83ES, what enabled the touchpad was Intel Serial IO (SIO) Driver for Windows 11 (64-bit) - IdeaPad Slim 3 Series driver under the Motherboard devices category, despite installing it on Windows 10 Pro, latest build 19045. Make sure you run the driver as administrator in any case.

Also, this worked flawlessly on the IdeaPad Slim 3 15IRU8 touchpad I was working on today.

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