“Focus on your driving” – TOCA Race Driver 2

It’s worth commenting on TOCA Race Driver 2 being the second Xbox #1 in a row, even if it was with a very low sales figure and Norton Internet Security 2004 as its nearest chart rival. Microsoft’s strategy of negotiating periods of format exclusivity was working out well, giving its console a boost while giving developers the attractive option of still targeting the massive audience of PS2 players later. Unfortunately I don’t have an Xbox and, thanks to Toca’s limited audience outside of Europe, this is the only Xbox game I’ll be covering for which Xbox 360 backwards compatibility doesn’t work. So I played the PS2 version. Please imagine some more technically impressive screenshots in place of the ones in this post. Even the PS2 version, though, is a clear technical improvement over the occasionally janky original. And more than just polishing things up, TOCA Race Driver 2 makes some fundamental changes, for better and for worse. 

Let’s take better first. The range of circuits and series in the first game was already one of the best things about it, but it hadn’t changed much since TOCA World Touring Cars and was ultimately all about driving things resembling road cars on purpose built tarmac tracks. TOCA Race Driver 2 gets much wilder with its variety, from open-wheel single-seater Formula Ford to racing trucks, and the handling models result in very different tactics and experiences. Formula Ford requires a very careful touch, not just because those wheels can get easily tangled but because hasty acceleration and turning can easily result in a spin. Although it’s still less twitchy than the Nascar-style oval races.

When racing trucks, meanwhile, just the screen-filling size of the thing makes immediately clear it’s a different beast. The driving is all about wrangling massive momentum, leaving the space to slow down and turn around something which does not want to slow down or turn around. And if that isn’t change enough, TOCA Race Driver 2 casually throws in some rally events straight out of the Colin McRae series too, Codemasters leveraging their catalogue in a similar way to EA in James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. The racing is just as good as its predecessor throughout, and much more varied. And all of the events are pulled together in a tight and taut career progression, with the addition of a couple of ongoing rivals to track your position against working very well.

The other big change to the career initially looks promising, but turns out to exacerbate some of the worst aspects of Toca Race Driver. It still has a plot but this time there is no Ryan McKane, no character presented as the player. Cutscenes are viewed in first person and your character never says a word. Which is the perfect opportunity to use ambiguity to make things more inclusive! Given the leering atmosphere of the previous game it comes as no surprise, however, that the result is very much not more inclusion. 

There is a prominent role for your Alf Stewart-looking Scottish manager, Rick Irving. The way that he talks a lot during the races, reasonably in line with the action happening, does provide some charming moments. I liked the fourth-wall-breaking response when I took a break and, on unpausing the game, was greeted with “Where the hell have you been? We’ve got a race to win here!”. However, he also refers to you as “lad” all the time, which is an intro to the game’s thoughtless sexism. The story involves Kat Silver, an agent with bright new ideas for winning you sponsorship and taking your career to bigger things. Rick is initially distrustful and dismissive of her and her female ways, but they eventually bond thanks to a common enemy, in the shape of Mandy, a younger woman making a documentary who turns out to be playing drivers off against each other. Rick refers to “bimbos with cameras”, double-crossing Mandy gets her comeuppance, and Kat reaches the elevated ground of being not like those other women.

Somewhere during all that, Kat punches a hot-tempered Brazilian driver after he gropes her, and it’s treated as a fun learning experience for everyone because, hey, that’s just what men are like, eh? You, man playing this game because men play racing games, are probably like that. At one point early on, Kat walks away and the camera follows behind her before snapping back to Rick as he calls out for you to “focus on your driving”. The message being that you, the player, assumed man, are attracted to women and they’re an unwelcome distraction. 

The silent, invisible protagonist doesn’t get much characterisation by design, but there are some assumptions deeply embedded in the world of TOCA that come through loud and clear. Nothing has changed since Tiff Needell used ‘he’ to refer to the player in the original TOCA Touring Car Championship. It’s lazy and thoughtless, and magnified in a slightly more developed plot. The switch from presenting a Ryan McKane character, who it is assumed is who the player wants to see, to directly assuming who the player is or wants to be makes it that much worse. TOCA Race Driver 2 is a superb racing simulation which can’t get away from the baggage of the series. The choices in where to focus on developing options beyond those in the previous game tells its own story.

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Top of the charts for week ending 24 April 2004:

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