Noob needs help selecting racing games

Noob, not noon! LOL.

So I now have a second racing wheel, so I'm thinking it would be fun to race against friends. Anyone have suggestions for specific games that support multiplayer racing?

Also, any suggestions for games better suited for kids? I am thinking more arcade style here as opposed to sim style. For example, features like fully automatic transmission, automatically put the car back on the track and pointed in the right direction after crashing, etc.

Thanks!

Grid 2, Dirt 2 and 3, Dirt Showdown, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Those are all good arcade level games.

Arsetto Corsca -
Love it - A "great" deal on Steam right now....Picked mine up Sat for 26.99 us.

I changed the title. Let me know if you prefer your original one

Agree. The settings in the Dirt series can be set to really easy for youngsters. NFS:HP is intrinsically a arcade racer.

Rfactor with certain mods can be fun for the kids too, there is an option in Rfactor that spins the car back to the right direction plus you can set it for steering and braking help too, Used on full setting can be made very easy for them to have a ball.

How old are the kids? Small kids like 4-8 or bigger?

Any Codemasters racing game can be pretty easy to setup and drive, turn on traction assists, braking help and similar stuff. And if you have two wheels, most of newer Codies titles have splitscreen option for more fun.
Codemasters have also F1 Stars game, lot of fun but this is really for kids

They are pretty young. My oldest is 8. I do have 2 wheels now too so split screen would be fun too. What about multiplayer games where each player has their own screen?

Dirt 3 is good arcade style with short races, good for kids as they usually have a short attention span.

WRC Powerslide - seems like fun game for kids, not expensive too.



http://store.steampowered.com/app/256350/

or for a bunch of adults for hours online together stoned as........

Ok I haven't built a new desktop PC yet so I am stuck using a laptop and I can't even get dirt 3 to install. LFS seems to run fine but I want a more arcade style option too. Does anyone know of some simtools supported games that would run on this laptop?

Specs:
Dell latitude E6510
Win 7 professional 64 bit
Intel core i5 M 520 @ 2.4GHz processor
4 GB RAM
DirectX 11

I assume just the integrated video card?

Thanks!
JB

go to www.canirunit.com and test the laptop to see if it will actually play the games you would like.
And also as it is a i5 only dual core, most newer games suck all the power of a dual core and that leaves nothing for anything else to run, Simtools included.
Really you need a decent quad core tower, stand alone graphics card - like a GTX66o (not sure what ATI equivalent is) , 4 gig ram minimum.
A few of us have tried to run newer games on a laptop and found out we need a tower.

I figured the newer games would not run well, so I was hoping an older one might be decent. Dirt 2 or something?

probably not dirt2, it can really suck up the power of a PC , once again run the webite test and see what you can actually play.

You can try the original DIRT game or Richard Burns Rally, but RBR is more true sim.
Maybe give rfactor a go and look for a rally car mod.

Edit again : some of the older games still drain power, although its not racing related, farcry 2 is still used for benchmarking PC graphics performance, and its from 2004 I think.

Dirt 3 is great fun, both my boys (5 & 8) loved playing it on the static sim. Might be different if I ever get it moving.
As far as pc specs go, the more ram and more powerful the graphics card the better.
I use a 6 core AMD, 16g of ram and a HD7770 graphics card with 4g of ram on it and it can still be a little glitchy on a 40" led monitor in Dirt3 and F1 2013. Grid2 seems to use less graphics power and runs very smoothly.

granted its on auto and easy, but...........

mind you, he prefers dirt showdown

yeh showdown is fun in a sim

Without hacking this thread too much, I took a simulator to my local public school for a fun day. 50 kids played runs in turns on showdown. Quite a lot of them have the game already on console and use a dpad, so to drive it on a motion sim was a wild ride.

you dont have kids do you

I didn't know that you could even use two wheels on one PC. I might set up another one for when my brother comes over sometimes.