An arcade racing game done well is simple: you are in a vehicle, and you want to go fast. The first hour of the game, or even the first ten minutes of the game, you get it–you move quickly through a handcrafted environment, with great movement and consequences for failure. It is the quintessential game when it comes to easy to learn, hard to master. And yet, there is nothing violent about it, or scary, or all that stressful (unless it’s one of the more competitive or difficult ones, like Trackmania). It just feels good.
Open world arcade racing games especially feel like one of the only types of games where you can turn it on and just relax. Listen to music, enjoy the scenery, drive a fast car through a busy city, and zone out. There are a few other single-player games with a similar zone out feeling, but not many, and certainly not many as pure and fun as arcade racers.
Oh cool, I kind of got interested in this stuff last year and read a short book about it.
A track is a series of challenges (corners), separated by straights, which give you a breather to recover and prepare for the next corner. In a circuit, you get multiple attempts to learn and improve your execution of those challenges. I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate that into other genres as well.
https://danielprimed.com/old_site/speed-boost-the-hidden-secrets-behind-arcade-racing-design/
The author also wrote some 500-600 page breakdown of Wario Land 4, which I also bought, but haven’t dared to start reading yet.
That looks like such a cool book!