

Laughable as it may sound, knowing what garbage the Test Drive franchise wound up becoming as one millennium changed to the next. Suppose your niche is more in line with street racing games with the best physics engine possible? Or perhaps the most eclectic and varied soundtrack for each car's engine? In that case, you'd be hard-pressed to do better in 1998 than Test Drive 5. But these two games fall on the more arcade flavor. Both hit the scene in 1998, in what was a landmark year in the history of driving sims. The original Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, the third installment in the series, or the original Colin McRae Rally, for example. There's a handful of late 90s PC and console racing games you could use as a focal lens to view these types of games from this era. But the most important keyword in all of that is "almost." At least from a subjective point of view, some of the greats came before Y2K.
