“This is a contact sport” – TOCA World Touring Cars

**TOCA World Touring Cars** (Codemasters, PlayStation, 2000)

I ended my Colin McRae Rally 2.0 post by talking about the hazards ahead for its model. With the TOCA series one game further on, after the tremendous TOCA 2, we get to see how Codemasters successfully answered the challenge of maintaining interest in a series based on a real-world sporting contest without a big audience. Yearly updates just wouldn’t do. The stark answer in TOCA World Touring Cars is to remove the British Touring Car Championship altogether.

Instead, it features a set of largely fictional events around the world involving the same kind of souped-up road cars. In its main career mode, you start out competing in local/national championships, then move up to regional ones and finally to the World Touring Car Championship. As a structure, it’s notably similar to that of Gran Turismo 2, with which it also shares quite a few car manufacturers. Far from just copying the leading game in the genre, though, the series of mini-championships provide the means for TOCA World Touring Cars to make the most of its own strengths.

As a veteran of the first two TOCA games with their series of purpose-built British circuits and fairly conservatively designed car liveries, some of the other championships come as a bit of a shock. The garish colour schemes of the cars in the Japanese championship take nearly as much adapting to as racing on the vast challenging length of a Suzuka circuit I’m more familiar with from Formula 1.

Then comes the North American championship, and driving a car with stars and stripes and a great honking eagle painted on it around the tight, right-angled confines of a Vancouver street circuit. In the dark. I actually wish they’d gone even further into sneakily selling British gamers a Nascar game and put in an oval track. Even without that, the range of new places to drive is a welcome change, but the driving experience is just the beginning.

The biggest thing about driving round that Vancouver track isn’t the new challenge of different types of corners with no margin for error before hitting a wall. It isn’t even the new sights and sounds. It’s racing against a field of other drivers: slamming them into walls, blocking them on tight straights safe in the knowledge that they have nowhere to go, watching them drive along with a bumper hanging off and scraping along the ground with sparks flying.

TOCA World Touring Cars doesn’t have the polish or detail of Gran Turismo 2. Its cars handle fairly similarly to each other and certainly don’t cover the same range, although driving them does have a well-judged subtlety that makes fishtailing as you accelerate away from a corner an ever-present but fair danger. What it has over its rival is that it isn’t a driving simulator but a racing simulator.

Gran Turismo has stiff, robotic opponents who drive their pre-set path and treat you as a regrettable inconvenience if they show any sign of having noticed you at all. TOCA World Touring Cars has opponents (with names!) who actively try to block you, and who beyond that get into scraps with each other and make daring moves. A couple of times I gained positions on the last lap because of opponents having spun ahead of me. There are still visible contrivances — my brakes always seemed a lot more powerful than anyone else’s on track — but it’s easier to believe that there are real people out there racing against you. In real cars, which take damage when hit, and don’t always co-operate with what they want them to do. It brings the racing to life.

TOCA World Touring Cars takes a step further away from simulation to focus on racing, but not so much that it sacrifices what made TOCA Touring Car Championship so appealing to begin with. At which point it feels like a good time to look back at the last few years and marvel at the achievements of Codemasters. Ultimate’s hot streak in the ‘80s covered little more than a year and was won against mostly local competition. Codemasters faced the move to consoles which killed off so many other British developers failing to compete with more established international rivals, and instead they thrived. Even some other British success stories of the time involved having one breakthrough and then running it into the ground, but Codemasters set up their own niche with two excellent series that they carefully tended into long-term prospects.

It can’t be said that Codemasters are under-appreciated, exactly. Its founders, David and Richard Darling, have received CBEs from the Queen. When the Royal Mail commemorated the icons of British gaming on their set of stamps last year, Codemasters were the only developer to have two different games included. But those were Micro Machines and Dizzy, from an earlier, more distinctly British, age. Its later series don’t get the same level of credit, perhaps as part of a general marginalisation of racing games in games discussion, perhaps because the contemporary standard they were competing against was defined by the global success of Tomb Raider and GoldenEye 007. TOCA World Touring Cars wasn’t able to wow America in the same way, even under the name Jarrett and Labonte Stock Car Racing. It’s a shame that we allow that to minimise the huge impact these games had in the UK so much.