Best Games - Super Sprint
There should be no world in which spinning a steering wheel as hard as you can and then grabbing it into a dead stop allows you drive a race car. The front wheels on your average car can only pivot over a small range before they become useless for actually turning. At speed this is even more true. Your steering wheel is nothing like the wheel of some pirates galleon it can’t actually turn a full 360. There would be no point to it and it would do nothing to help you with control of the vehicle or feel for the road. Super Sprint requires that you spin that wheel and get good at it.
Controlling the ultra slippery cars of Super Sprint is all in the wrist. Well, the wrist, forearm, shoulder, and maybe the hips. Can it be played without throwing a significant amount of your entire body into it? Maybe, but I can’t see how that would be fun. Success at Super Sprint requires very physical interaction. The really interesting part is that the interaction you are required to do bears no resemblance to the activity the game is asking you to simulate. What you are doing is nothing like driving, but it feels like driving a race car. Or it feels like what you imagine driving a race car would feel like.
So, in my research I couldn’t find any technical description of how the software in Super Sprint actually reacted to a player manipulating the wheel. I don’t know for sure, but examining it from the outside, it seems like Super Sprint doesn’t really care how fast the wheel spins. The cars seem to have a fixed rotation speed coded into them. Spinning the steering wheel faster than that would have no extra effect. What’s more, the wheel also has no actual center. It reads rotation clockwise and counterclockwise, but it doesn’t seem to care what position the wheel starts in. It’s only reading rotation left and right. That means that you can spin the wheel left very hard, stop it immediately, and rotate it slightly to the right and the cumulative effect would be that the car would veer sharply left and then instantly center and start turning right. Oversteer does not exist in the physics model of Super Sprint.
You don’t steer the cars in Super Sprint like you would steer a real car. You steer the cars, speedy, drifty, open wheel race cars, like you feel like you should. Physically, drastically, and with no small amount of style.
Super Sprint doesn’t even attempt to be an accurate simulation of driving. Instead it tries to recreate how we pretend to drive. The over exaggerated pantomime of winning an F1 race. It’s like air guitar with a steering wheel and it does it fantastically.
Super Sprint is one of the best games.