Total Immersion Racing

Every rival on the grid keeps a mental note of what you did to him. Punt a car wide at the hairpin and that driver does not simply respawn into his racing line and forget; he carries the slight forward, sits on your bumper, and looks for the chance to return it. Razorworks called it driver personality and built most of the game's marketing around it, and in 2002 that was a genuinely unusual thing to put at the centre of a racing game, when the competition was still content with rubber-band AI that treated the player as scenery.

The cars are GT machinery rather than road stock, which was the other point of difference: Lister, Panoz, Saleen, Mosler, TVR, the sort of low-volume endurance metal that rarely got licensed. They handle with weight and some genuine reluctance to be hurried, closer to a sim than to the arcade end of the sixth generation, and the handling model punishes a lazy entry more than it rewards a brave one. Progression runs through a season structure with a team behind you, engineers and a mentor figure feeding advice between sessions, which gives the racing more narrative furniture than most of its contemporaries bothered with.

What it could not do was look or sound the part. The tracks are flat and underpopulated, the frame rate wobbles when the field bunches, and the presentation has the slightly grey, unfinished quality of a mid-budget European release trying to sit at the same table as Gran Turismo. Reviews at the time were polite about the ideas and hard on the execution, and that split has held up.

Play it now and the AI still does something that most racing games of the era, and plenty since, do not. The pack behaves like a group of people with opinions about you. That is worth an evening even when the car in front is stuttering across a texture-poor Silverstone and the engine note sounds like it was recorded through a wall. The ambition sits right at the front of the design, unhidden, and so does the shortfall.

It is one of those PS2 racers that is more interesting to think about than to win, a good idea shipped a generation before the hardware and the budget could carry it properly.