Sports Car GT

The Good
In order to properly review this game, I cannot just talk about Sports Car GT (or SCGT for short) as it came from the game studio. However, it was very good at its core, from handling to realism, track detail, and AI. ISI did a great job of recreating the real-life cars and tracks that formed the basis for the game. However, the greatest aspect of the code is that it was easily modified, and this resulted in a large community to support and improve the game.

Not only were mods released to upgrade the graphics and improve the realism, the game also became a platform for all sorts of complete car and track add-ons to turn it into any number of different games. From open-wheel racers to sports cars, touring cars and stock cars, and all things in between. Many tracks were created, both real and fictional, to allow for plenty of unique races. Want to race a Ferrari on a figure-8 track, or take a Winnebago for a spin on the Nurburgring? It's all possible in SCGT. In fact, so many new cars and tracks were released that it would be impossible to have them all installed at once. Track managers and new executables were created to make this problem easier to manage.

The Bad
Of course, SCGT was not without its flaws. With the flexible game engine also came some glitches and crashes. It was slightly prone to bugs from the start, and adding mods only made things more complicated. Tracking down a bug to one mod or another could be very frustrating at times. Sometimes a crash could be blamed on improper mod installation, or a mistake by the creator of the mod. However, at times the game would crash for no identifiable reason.

Also, the game does not support the yellow caution flag for racing incidents. Visual damage was not enabled from the box, although it was added later by an unofficial patch which simply re-enabled the piece of code that was not initially activated. There were some other limitations on the realism, such as dynamic weather and AI performance on banked turns.

The Bottom Line
Overall, SCGT was a masterpiece. It set the benchmark for many sim-racing games to follow, both in terms of realism and customization, and it outlasted similar offerings in popularity.