I took my driving test once, failed it, and haven’t tried again since. My experience of driving an actual car is limited to the lessons I took. I have been into driving games since well before that though. It comes from a place somewhere in between my love for platform games and for rhythm games. Somewhere between moving through a place and exploring what I called with Sega Rally Championship “the balance between calculation and instinct, the way that you take a flow of information and translate it into constant movements and adjustments and adjustments to adjustments” comes a focus that I can’t get enough of.
I don’t have quite the same fascination with cars, though. I mean, I played with plenty of toy ones (probably including some Micro Machines) and was around plenty of family members who were way more into them, so I guess there is something there, but it’s not quite the full thing. Which sets me a little against what Porsche Challenge, our second product placement car game in a row, expects. It’s a game in which you drive a Porsche Boxster, and it is much more about the Boxster than Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 was about the Esprit and Elan. The main menu to Porsche Challenge includes an option to, essentially, watch an advert for the car. It’s not a bad advert, but it’s still watching an advert. It did not make my pulse race in any way.
Fortunately, though, while Sony Computer Entertainment Europe may have expected players to be excited about the car, they didn’t expect them to stop there. Porsche Challenge provides an impressive driving experience. The car’s handling is complex and it takes some getting used to how it behaves in different scenarios, but it’s not horrible and the sense of something with actual momentum comes through it all.
You might only get a choice of four tracks, but they are interesting ones. They have a range of settings from city to alpine, which are reasonably well-realised in terms of being a place, and much more well-realised in terms of being somewhere to race cars on fast. All of the tracks are full of changes and elevation and surface that multiply the possibilities for how to tackle them. The track which is nominally in Japan could really be a built up city at night time just about anywhere, and is all a little grey, but its sequence of 90 degree corners with their varied widths and obstacles determining different approaches to cutting them is a trial which rewards replaying. I enjoyed racing on it but also just enjoyed time trials and trying to cut seconds off my time.
Another thing that Porsche Challenge has going for it is that it takes itself seriously in its driving, but not entirely in everything. Pushed by near-necessity as a result of depicting a convertible, SCEE come up with six different drivers in their different colour cars. At the start of each race your choice of character exchanges words with the nearest opponent. Those sketches with the drivers are limited enough that they soon begin to grate, but just like in Micro Machines V3, personalising things is a net positive. Driving around as Nikita with her N1K1T4 numberplate and all helps make the game feel at least a little less sterile and corporate.
For all its gets right, Porsche Challenge is a bit limited in its scope. It’s not as obviously a proof-of-concept as Cool Boarders must have been even at the time, but in retrospect it looks like one too. Except in this case work on bigger successors was already well underway. Porsche Challenge shows an in-house Sony developer executing a successful formula for a driving game: racing a handful of opponents, on a range of interesting invented but realistic tracks, using a meticulously detailed real car. How much better still would it be to do the same thing with more tracks and a hundred more cars?
