My return to racing continues...well, not racing per se: these days I drive more like a mechanic who stole the keys. I just did a quick bit of math and realized that is has been almost five years (!!) since I last dusted off the wheel, and nearly as long since I did any simulation coding. Kids will do that to you, I guess.

It is too close to the gift-giving season to pick up any (relatively) new sims for myself, and honestly I'm so out of the scene that I don't even know which ones are any good. So for now the retro racing revolution continues, this time with the-sim-that-will-not-die Grand Prix Legends.

I really expected to find this sim—initially released in 1998—pretty much where I left it. I knew about the GPL Preservation Society, the massive track database, and the active modding community, but really how much can you do with a decade old, closed source sim? Quite a bit, as it turns out! Case in point: the jaw-dropping Targa Florio, 72 km of pure road racing joy. Grand Prix Legends is like Steve McQueen's Le Mans: a classic!

Because of all the mods and patches, there is some hoop jumping involved to get up and running. The hardest part was figuring out which bits I needed and where to get them; I'll save you that trouble with a full play-by-play below. Installation was straightforward from there, and it runs great on my MacBook Pro under both Boot Camp and VMware Fusion 3.0 (be sure to switch to full screen before starting the game; it doesn't like Unity).

Okay, enough chit-chat. Here's my installation guide.

Ah, the original Need for Speed! Alpine, Coastal, Vertigo Ridge—great tracks now trapped in an out-dated game, passed by in time. As an avid road-tripper, I loved those open road tracks and the opportunity to drive with traffic in an environment that, for the time, felt realistic. I even plunked down the cash for a Thrustmaster T1 wheel and pedals.

Several years ago I had the idea to rip out those tracks and convert them to run in a modern simulator. With some help from Denis Auroux (the author of TRACKED, to my knowledge the first player-created editor for a commercial game) I was able to decode the track segments and textures. But then I got distracted, my attention turned elsewhere, life and children caught me up, and the code was left to collect dust.

Now the driving bug is biting again and I'm blowing the dust off this project as a first, small step back into simulation coding. I dug up my circa 1995 NFS SE CD and got it running on my 2009 MacBook Pro. It is…dated, as you can imagine. The steering and handling is all over the place compared to a modern sim; I have no idea how we managed those quick laps back in the day!

(As an aside, I used to run the AutoSim World Records Site back then, which you can still find in the Internet Archive. None of those records are mine though; too much time building websites and not enough racing.)

In case you feel like following along, here's how I got it working.

I missed the official trailer for The Last Guardian, the new game-in-progress from Fumito Ueda, that was shown at E3 last month. I'm a big fan of Ico and Shadow of the Colussus, and very excited to see what he's got in store for the PS3.

From GameSpot

It looks like a blend of the two previous games, with a Colussus taking on the role of the Princess. I'd guess that there's more to it than that though, considering Fumito's history of creative, emotional gameplay — and the way he's harshed on others for not showing the same inspiration.

I replayed Colussus last fall and, after defeating the first few, spent the rest of the weekend just traveling with Agro looking for all the apple trees and white-tailed lizards. It was relaxing and satisfying, much like exploring Hillys in Beyond Good and Evil. Here's hoping they find a place for that kind of open-ended exploration in Guardian.

Here's a fun discovery: Ubisoft has released the soundtrack for Beyond Good & Evil, as high-quality MP3s, for free. They must have done it some time ago as the original download page has disappeared, but happily it has found a home on MySpace.

Most people probably have never heard of Beyond Good & Evil, a third-person action-adventure that was released back in the 2003 holiday season — and promptly lost among the Maddens and Tony Hawks that dominate that time of year. A shame too, because it is an awful lot of fun, and remains to this day one of our all-time favorites. There is nothing particular about the game that stands out as great. Rather, everything just comes together — the characters, the environments, the voice acting, the music, the story — to turn what is essentially a sequence of mini-games into something compelling. Even now, several years later, we still occasionally fire it up, and it is still a blast. Playing the soundtrack at work is a surreal treat.

If you like the genre, and you can find a copy, it is worth picking up. Here are the Amazon links on the off-chance you can find a seller: for the Playstation2, for Windows PCs, for the Xbox, and the GameCube. PC users can also get it on Steam and Direct2Drive. If you do give it a try, be sure to let me know what you thought.

In case you don't believe me, here is a well-written retrospective on EuroGamer.

Update: Beyond Good and Evil 2 has a ship date! Woot!