Summary
I agree, awful racing game
The Good
This is a game with very few positive points, two of them really stand out from the pack: the soundtrack... featuring wicked and outstanding music which you can hear in your cd player, and the drag racing feature, innovative at its time, and fun, really fun and the times set by the cars are more or less accurate. Also, the cars featured are really cool but unbalanced, because that "old vs new" concept worked, in some aspects. The older cars have more power and overall speed, but the newer have better handling and acceleration.
The Bad
The AI is pretty bad, or good depending on what you expect from it, Once a rival surpasses you, there is a very small chance to see it again. It is pretty lame too that you can't almost never win with the lower-end cars, but the computer does it very frequently, for example in a XJ-220 vs Shelby Cobra duel, the first one is the car with the winning odds, until the cobra magically duplicates its horsepower (or whatsoever) leaving you behind really easy. Also, the graphic engine is really flawed, and the physics are too heavy and unresponsive, to properly finish one of the complex circuits you need to pick a slower car to handle the curves without crashing, but choosing such a car only guarantees you a defeat -you can´t even reach the checkpoints-. You can't adjust the difficulty either, because even if you do, you can't notice any difference.
The Bottom Line
I thought at first that I didn't achieve many victories in the game because I was only a bad player, but then I realised that everyone else complained about the game's extreme difficulty. And yes, it is a very difficult game, and together with the control they become lethal issues for any racing game. Its really impossible to unlock the hidden content because it's unlikely that anyone could win all the tracks. You could be leading a race for 3/4 of it, and with a minimum mistake you could lose easily 3 or 4 positions and never regain them again, especially in the circuits with many curves.
If you want fun with it, play only the drag racing mode, Apart from that is a very bad entry in the respected test drive series.
