STCC - The Game Demo

STCC - The Game remains to this day one of the best racing simulators ever made, and it comes from a studio with a long tradition in this genre, SimBin.

Racing games are a dime a dozen, but good racing games are a rare breed. Many studios have tried over the years to make authentic and realistic racing simulators, but there is one problem. They don’t sell very good because most players are not professional racing drivers, and they do a poor job at playing the game.

If you have a racing title that’s really good at imitating real life, the odds are that very few people are going to be good at it. Most racing games are actually arcade racers, which allows most users just to pick it up and defeat the AI. When you’re playing something like STCC - The Game the first enemy if yourself and all of those years that taught you the wrong way of handling a car.

STCC - The Game as the official game of the “STCC - Swedish Touring Car Championship” and that says a lot. The demo is pretty limited, and only one car and one track are available, but it will probably take a lot of time until players will be able to properly control and understand the car.

The cars have mass, a proper damage model, and the speed is very accurate. If you’re doing 80 km/h in a turn where you need to have 40 km/h, you’re not going to make it. Braking is most important than acceleration, so it needs to become second nature.

Also, players don't need to go head on into the race. One of the entries in the menu is called practice, and it’s there for a reason. It’s not enough to know how the car handles; you also have to know the course by heart.

Even if the game is rather old, STCC - The Game still looks quite good, although this was never one of its strengths. It also means that most people will be able to download and play it.