I finally managed to nab some OEM controllers for my old Gamecube and to be honest, I only ever played arcade racers on the PS2 back in the day so this is some unexplored territory for me. I’ve heard the Gamecube framerate was uncapped so apparently game performance was better?

Any recommendations are welcome! I’m ganna indoctrinate my friends kiddos into racing games this way :P They’re like 3 and 4 so we’ll see how that goes.

This developer has created a great open source cross-platform wrapper for Need for Speed II SE, that allows it to run on modern x86 and amd64 hardware. Here is a short guide on how to play this amazing game using this wrapper.

Mount the NFSIISE CD-ROM

Note: I do not want to promote piracy in this community, as I feel this community is not a good place for that discussion.

My legal backup of my Need for Speed II SE CD-ROM was for some reason in bin/cue format, so here is how I managed to extract its contents:

On Windows, I used this open-source software called WinCDEmu. It allowed me to mount the bin/cue files and extract the contents.

On Linux, I extracted the contents in two steps. First, I ran this command to convert from bin/cue to ISO (bchunk is in my distribution's repositories):

bchunk nfs2se.bin nfs2se.cue nfs2se.iso

Then, I opened my file manager (in my case, dolphin), and right clicked the ISO file to mount it.

Download the NFSIISE Wrapper

The open-source cross-platform wrapper can be downloaded here. Download the wrapper for your operating system, extract it, and put the FEDATA and GAMEDATA directories from the CD-ROM in the wrapper's directory.

In the case of Windows, this is all that needs to be done. The executable from the cross-platform wrapper should now run fine. On Linux, you may have to run the script titled convert_to_lowercase. You also want to make sure you have all the necessary 32-bit dependencies. I run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and I believe since I have steam downloaded that I already had all necessary 32-bit dependencies. In case you don't and are on a Debian-based system, try running these commands as root:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt update
apt install libgx-mesa0:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386

Now you should be good to enjoy this 1997 classic!

Mine was Formula 1 Simulator on the C16. I may have played others before then but this is the first I remember, and I played it loads.

An arcade racing game done well is simple: you are in a vehicle, and you want to go fast. The first hour of the game, or even the first ten minutes of the game, you get it--you move quickly through a handcrafted environment, with great movement and consequences for failure. It is the quintessential game when it comes to easy to learn, hard to master. And yet, there is nothing violent about it, or scary, or all that stressful (unless it's one of the more competitive or difficult ones, like Trackmania). It just feels good.

Open world arcade racing games especially feel like one of the only types of games where you can turn it on and just relax. Listen to music, enjoy the scenery, drive a fast car through a busy city, and zone out. There are a few other single-player games with a similar zone out feeling, but not many, and certainly not many as pure and fun as arcade racers.

For me: the Out Run OST. Everyone listens to and praises Nintendo OSTs or Square Enix, but Out Run is something else. I have rarely listened to video game music that catchy.