TOCA has decent physics and the tracks are pretty much spot on for the real thing.

Yeah, but you'll have to agree that TOCA's feel is still very arcade-y compared to the realistic sims from Papyrus. The physics are a decent balance between arcade and sim, but it's not a real sim by any stretch of the imagination.

I mean, I got a more realistic feel from Papyrus' original "Indy Car Racing" (the DOS one with VGA graphics that ran great on a 386) than I do from TOCA.

My only problem with TOCA is that I've got no feeling for when the snap oversteer is going to happen on any of the cars. I can't feel the breakaway coming like I could on Indy Car Racing. One review of TOCA said it seemed like the snap oversteer was coded in as an afterthought, and I have to agree. It seems "tacked on" to me, as if there were a line of code saying, "if carG > maxG then doSpinout();". I can never anticipate it and I lose control to oversteer far too often.

On the other hand, I can think of one driving game that felt 100 percent realistic to me: Atari's "Hard Drivin'" in the arcades. When it first came out, and when the hardware was new and in working order, it was the most realistic-feeling driving game I've ever played. Nowadays, if you happen to find a machine, the force feedback steering and the shifter are almost invariably broke (or operating poorly), and it's no fun.

But when a Hard Drivin' machine is in tip-top shape, it is a sublime experience. I can literally drag that Ferrari right up to the hairy edge of gip, and actually FEEL the car begin to break loose. It's more than just the presence of feedback steering. The feedback was so perfectly tuned that I could predictably bring the car to the edge of losing control without going over. And when the car slid into understeer or snapped into oversteer, it never felt wrong. I always knew why it had happened.

But the most amazing part of Hard Drivin' was your ability to actually CORRECT an understeer or oversteer condition realistically. In most arcade racers, a spinout is a spinout, and once you lose control, there's nothing you can do. In Hard Drivin', you could feel it coming, and add/remove throttle, or feather the brake, or correct your steering, and the car would behave predictably.

Now. If they could just remake Hard Drivin' with the GT3 graphics engine, we'd be SET.

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Tony Fabris