Touring Car Champions

released on Jun 01, 1997

Touring Car Champions was the first attempt to create a game based on the Australian Touring Car Championship and Bathurst 1000. It was also the first to use full motion video as the base for a racing game.


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Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/touring-car-champions-ms-dos-review/

Touring Car Champions might be one of the most annoying racing games that I’ve ever played. Maybe not the worst, but definitely one of the most annoying. Right now I’d be willing to bet that a few of you might thinking to yourself “Hey, I remember that game, and it wasn’t that annoying. What the heck are you talking about?” The game you’re remembering is TOCA: Touring Car Championship, a game that came out the same year as Touring Car Champions, and was an actual, fully fledged racing game. And good too.

And considering that 1997, the year this game came out, was also the year of other better racing games such as Need for Speed II, Gran Turismo, Moto Racer, and NASCAR ’98, it’s no wonder this game was forgotten to time. And to top it all off, this racing game decided to jump on the FMV bandwagon. Yep, it’s an FMV rgame.

Touring Car Champions was released in 1997 for MS-DOS. It was developed by Torus Games, an Australian company only known for various ports of other games to the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance as well as a few licensed games, and are surprisingly have been around since 1994 and are still going. To this day, they’re still releasing cheap licensed games and ports, and it’s quite amazing that they’ve lasted this long. They even have this game listed on their website. It was also published by Virtual Sports Interactive, who as far as i can tell, only published this game, which is a bad sign.

This game has the distinction of being the first game based on the Australian Car Touring Championship and Bathurst 1000, so it does have something going for it. But the only people who want to know an obscure face like that are motorsports fans and fans of obscure video games.

The game only has only one track, and that is the Mount Panorama Circuit, which is used in the Bathurst 1000. But instead of recreating the entire track in either 3D or 2D, the developers decided to use a looping recording of the track. I imagine it would have been neat to see a recording of the track from the perspective of the driver, but they could have saved money, time, and effort and easily released it on VHS at the time in a higher quality and without having to play an awful game to see it. And not only that, there is a bunch of stuff cluttering your view of it, so even enjoying it for the fact that you get to see some video from the sport you you enjoy, it’s pretty much worthless.

At least if the single track that they had was recreated, you could have messed around in it by driving in the wrong direction or at least seeing parts of the track from the tarmac itself. The game doesn’t even have that going for it.

Something actually interesting about the game is that it was fully endorsed by the Holden Racing Team, Holden Special Vehicles, Mount Panorama Consortium, and Mt Panorama Motor Racing Hall of Fame. The game even claims that has both Ford and Holden in there so, so i guess it has the infamous Holden and Ford competitive vibe going for it? This is probably not the best way to duke it out between the two companies.

If the track is FMV of the actual track, then you’re probably asking how the driving handles. The developers thought it was a good idea to put the vehicle you’re driving on top of the video. So what you’re left with is a visual mess that has no consistency. It’s so bad that the game has to tell you which car is yours before the race starts with giant bold letters “THIS IS YOU.”

To make matters worse, half of the screen is taken up by the dashboard of the car. So you left with two-thirds of track left to try and race on. It makes it confusing, because one part of your brain is trying to focus on your car, but another part is so used to seeing the dashboard when you’re trying to emulate actually driving the game. You won’t ever get used to it.

Either have the video full screen with minimal HUD elements, or have the whole game from the drivers perspective, with the video being full screen being the preferable since having the dashboard there doesn’t make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. But considering that the whole game is looping video with zero visual difference, the former would have be the only viable option.

Even the sound is annoying. The cars engine’s are overpowering and are incredibly loud. So much so that I permanently turned the sound off. There isn’t any music either, so it’s either the sound of the car’s engines boring themselves into your hear or silence. If you haven’t turned the game off at this point, I’d say turn the sound off and play some AC/DC in the background.

Once you get passed the eyesore that are the graphics, there is a very basic game here. There is the practice mode, where you can spend your time trying to get used to the game to see if you’ll end up playing the rest of it. There is Quickrace, where you can pick from a few basic options, such as the amount of laps you want, the amount of opponents, and the difficulty setting before jumping into a single race. And there is a “Round”, which is the tournament mode of the game, which spans several seasons of the Bathurst 1000.

“Round” is where most of the game is. You can select from a few real life drivers, such as Craig Lowndes, Peter Brock, Tomas Mezera, and Greg Murphy, as well as a generic girl or guy (the games description, not mine), as well as being able to select a team, manager, and pit crew, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect the game at all, so you could pick them at random and still get the same results. That also goes with the car upgrades, which include everything from the brakes, to the engine, to the exhaust.

There are only two real things that matter when it comes to the gameplay. The first is going off the track onto the dirt. Considering there isn’t any real feedback other than you slowing down, it’s hard to figure out what part of the screen is dirt and which part is the track. Something that would have been solved if the game had actual graphics instead of incredibly limited video.

The second is trying to get passed the other cars. At the beginning of a race, all of the cars are close to each other, and the perspective is atrocious, which makes trying to pass them difficult. And not in a way that realistically fits racing, but in a way that is only present in broken video games. When you hit another car, you comically spin around, confirming that the game wasn’t intended to be realistic or even good, but simply to show off the product, which are the cars and the Bathurst 1000.

The game is very basic, and because of it’s limited tracks, awful visuals, and annoyingly loud engine noises, it can’t even achieve being a simple fun racing game. The only people who would have played this are fans of the Bathurst race. And even then, there are better racing games out there featuring the track, such as the Forza and V8 Supercars/TOCA franchises. Even if you just like racing games in general, this came out the same year as the original Gran Turismo and TOCA Touring Car Championship, and even more arcade style games such as Need For Speed II and Moto Racer.

Torus Games still has this game on their website with pictures and text written like they’re still proud of it. The only good thing I can say is that getting this game up and running is fairly easy in this modern age of gaming with the advent of Dosbox. While it’s not the worst racing game that I’ve played, there’s a reason that this game has been almost completely forgotten by time, and you should definitely avoid this game, especially since there have been better games since.