Slipstream

Racing games are in a weird spot for me where I really liked a few as a child, but I haven't played anything quite as good in the last... 10 years? So I'm not sure if it's nostalgia or if I really haven't found / given any good racing games a try. Well, I played some Slipstream today, and it was at least as bad as the other ones I've played recently. So that just adds to my reluctance to try them out.

Slipstream is very simple, veering more towards "realistic" racing games. You got your accelerate, break, and left and right turns, and that's all. The tracks consist of straight segments, and curving segments. You can execute a drift by a quick and simple key combination, and driving behind a car will give you an acceleration boost.
You have 3 attributes on your car - acceleration, top speed, and handling. Handling is useless since you'll need to drift on every curve anyways, and that will be enough to make every curve if you're playing well. Acceleration is only useful if you're not playing well and losing speed, at which point taking it would gimp your other stats putting you even further behind. And then finally top speed is all you need if you can just play well and not hit walls or other cars too much.
Speaking of other cars, they don't exactly follow your rules. Their speed and turning is "as is convenient". Some examples include: Everyone overtaking you at the start of a race with extreme acceleration, possibly so it would be "fun" to catch up to each of them? They can execute instantaneous turns to avoid crashes. And I could swear there was something off with how fast they went at different parts of the race. It was as if they were trying to keep a semi-constant gap with each other when you weren't there.

Overall, the cheating AI and having very few game mechanics sucked. It had some different game modes but there wasn't much of a functional difference. Cars felt the same, tracks felt the same, and oh I hate having car collisions in racing games where it's not some central game mechanic. A penalty should not be imposed on me because someone else is occupying the same space as me while the lead, who is already better, is driving further away without interruption.
To compare to the racing games mentioned at the start, I was a big fan of Trackmania. The tracks were really interesting, had realistic-seeming physics (yes, I do question being able to drive on walls, the ceiling, or flying through the air to land so very nicely again, but I never felt like I was non-physically glued to the track), and I could see other cars without bloody running into them. Another one was some flash game, the name of which eludes me, that very much had collision as a game mechanic. It had massively unique cars from formula-like cars that were super fast, but you basically lost if anyone hit you or vice versa, to a damn truck which was slow but could just ram the opponents to oblivion. It had ramps, jumping through rings, doing tricks in the air for speed boosts... It was great, and a good example of varied cars and how to incorporate car collisions into a racing game without it feeling shit.

I got rambling a bit in the end about other games, but I wanted to mention them, since I have no clue when I'll next play a racing game. I'm trying to steer clear from any aiming for realism at least, since I really don't feel like driving on a 2D track just going left, right, and forward is fun. But Slipstream, I wouldn't recommend.