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Home » 5 Cars, 5 Video Games (Alfa SZ, Impreza, Testarossa, Hilux, Esprit)

5 Cars, 5 Video Games (Alfa SZ, Impreza, Testarossa, Hilux, Esprit)



I’ve teamed up with Neil from the RMC channel (@RMCRetro) to look at 5 driving games and the cars behind them.

Take a look at the RMC channel here: www.youtube.com/RMC-Retro
Here’s his video about the Thrustmaster Steering Wheel restoration: https://youtu.be/S19o1VRVlfQ

If you’d like to support what I do, and get early access to advert-free videos and exclusive channel updates, please consider supporting the channel from just $1 or 80p a month: http://patreon.com/bigcar

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40 thoughts on “5 Cars, 5 Video Games (Alfa SZ, Impreza, Testarossa, Hilux, Esprit)”

  1. Are you kidding me? The 2 most pleasant voices of niche history channels in one video?! No offence to the other folks, you know who you are, we love your work and presentation as well. What I can think of as a complimentary video is Adrian and Ben building a retro gaming machine from scratch, with the input of the 8-bit guy, hardware&software, and then Nostalgia Nerd explaining the historical significance of the project, haha :D.
    Somebody make me stop commenting videos before I watch them through, my adhd seems to be kicking in.

  2. This was really nice to see, I've watched quite a lot of RMC's videos.
    I've never actually played the first CMR, but did play a hell of a lot of 2.0 and 04, I got the former randomly for my then very aged PC in the mid to late 00s though, when a lot of my games were ones that looked neat in a local charity shop. I've got Lotus Turbo Challenge on the Megadrive, but I believe that's the 2nd one, but they dropped the 2 since the first didn't make it to a Sega system.

  3. Oh man, so much nostalgia here. Lotus 3 was the second racing game I owned (after the original Test Drive), and definitely my favourite as a kid. I also had Off-Road, but never really managed to get into it. Colin McRae Rally was one of the first games I bought with my own money, after the family PC was upgraded to one that could run it. I later sold it to buy CMR2.0, but I've always preferred the atmosphere of the first game to any other title in the series.

  4. OK let's see… As an eighties kid I first got switched on to cars with the likes of KITT from Knight Rider, Bandit's Trans Am, Magnum's Ferrari, the black Countach in Cannonball Run, the DeLorean Time Machine. – And I mean obsessed with cars. So If I ever saw anything resembling a steering wheel on an arcade game it was like a drug, wasting too much money I never had on them (and that of my parents!). The original OutRun and Chase HQ were my absolute absolute favourite aracde games back in the day, especially the ones that were installed in a mock up of the actual car. – I'd own those now if I could… and if I had the space… and thousands of excess pounds to spend!

    My first taste of home gaming was my best friends Sinclair Spectrum 48K; I was sooo jealous but the closest thing he had to car games on it was Formula 1 which was awful and Spy Hunter, which was a top down, avoid-crashing-into-things vertical scroll game.

    Personally, my first gaming system was an Atari 2600… The only car game I had for that was "Dodge-Em" – a sort of PacMan game only with an X-shaped vehicle that was a car only in that you were told that was what it's supposed to be! – No, nothing remotely arcade quality here.

    My folks bought me a Sinclair Spectrum 128K +2 (with lightgun!) in the late eighties. Car games were starting to get a little more sophisticated now (and familiar). On the Spectrum I had OutRun, Turbo OutRun, Crazy Cars, Road Blasters and my absolute favourites (and very much played to death) Chase HQ and Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.

    Enter the world of 16-Bit: My Atari 520 STFM. Again I killed sooo many hours on that machine spending most of my life on Elite, Xenon 2 and the paint program Hyperpaint 2. Carwise there was just the usual suspects in Chase HQ, OutRun, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. But they were trumped by Lotus III The Ultimate Challenge; that RECS system was nothing short of magic to me and I actually quite liked the futuristic track with the magnets, the lasers and the turbo zones!

    I had an Amiga 500 for a short while but I didn't have much in the way of car games that were different to the Atari. Mine was second-hand and so came with a box load of games which included Lotus III (despite being the same game as the Atari, the quality of the in-game music on the Amiga version was significantly improved), Crazy Cars III, Chase HQ 2, and Jaguar XJ220.

    Then a pal of mine built his first PC in 1997ish and introduced me to Need For Speed 2… A monster in me was born and I had to have it. I became a PC nerd, built my own machine and the various chapters of the Need for Speed gaming franchise became my goto car games right up to present day. I was ravenous for Need for Speed releases, snatching them all as they became available every other year or so but I've sort of left the world of games behind in recent years if I'm honest; my most recent instalment from the Need for Speed series being "Rivals" (from 2014!). Need for Speed: Shift (from about 2007) would have to be my favourite racing game though; of all the car games I have, it's catalogue of tracks, it library of cars, the quality of the environments; it was all pretty enough. I also liked the open worldness and car choices of "Most Wanted" (the second one from 2012). Oh and the racing simulator Assetto Corsa deserves a mention; really nicely done.

    With my most recent upgrade and reinstallation of my PC, I assembled what I nicknamed my "Retro Gaming Box". Thanks to the internet and some truly clever nerds who have shared their efforts across numerous sites on Internetland, I was able to build up a stock of emulators for the Sinclair Spectrum, Atari 2600, Atari ST, Amiga, Sega Mega Drive and even arcade hardware (Yes both OutRun and Chase HQ from the source!) as well as virtual machine softwares containing prior versions of Windows thus enabling me to run and revisit every game I could remember playing from back in the day and they all look, sound and perform EXACTLY as I remember. – A proper nostalgia fest for me for sure.

    Also, if you're interested in having a fully reconstructed arcade edition of OutRun for the PC, check out this guy's project page: https://github.com/djyt/cannonball/wiki

  5. What a wonderful collab! Brings back fond memories of 4-player Lotus II when my best friend came to stay and we could serial-link our Amiga 500s. I believe Stunt Car Racer also supported that for head-to-head 2-player racing. Amazing that by the end of the decade we had games like Driver on the PC, with its outrageous physics model and sleazy '70s movie vibe (complete with Film Director replay mode).

  6. Colin mcrae rally was the only reason I bought a PlayStation. Doing scandi flicks with the steering wheel and trying not to let it fall off the coffee table, great fun.
    Thank god I'm not one of these anoraks that would say the turbo esprit wasn't a 2 litre but had a 2.2 litre engine as did the na from later s2 models onwards, or that the testarossa was a flat 12 not a v12, im sure some sad nutter will point that out though…
    Seriously, love the car history stuff keep it up

  7. I'm surprised how many of these games I know. Then again, having owned an Amiga in the early 90s, maybe I shouldn't be. Personally I liked the Jaguar XJ220 game more than the Lotus Challenge games. Simply because that car felt like it was from the future.

  8. My favourite car game as a kid was Turbo Esprit (1986) for Spectrum by Durrell (I think). The game is far better than the car. It plays like an early GTA. In my experience very few licensed games feel anything like the real car, so I quite like fictional models in games.

  9. Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge II was a big part of my life as a 7 year old and kickstarted a life long car enthusiasm. I still have my copy of the game 🎉

    I also had the Ivan Steward Off Road on the Amiga 🙂 And of course Outrun was important to me.

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