Touring Car Champions

Not to be confused with the TOCA Touring Car Championship game developed by Codemasters. Touring Car Champions is a 1997 racing game based on the Australian Touring Car Championship. It was developed by Torus Games (the same developers behind Classified: The Sentinel Crisis and published by Virtual Sports Interactive for the MS-DOS only in Australia.

Why They Aren't Champions

 * 1) The whole concept of the game is an entire mess and a bad idea in general, consisting in an ugly hybrid of a racing simulator and a full-motion video game, probably trying to imitate what Cyclemania did three years before, but done much worse, as most of the problems related to the game are caused by this terrible idea.
 * 2) The game is not consistent with its title, the box cover and the title screen when you open the game says "Touring Car Champions", but in the other game menus it says "Touring Car Championship", probably trying to be an indirect knock-off of TOCA Touring Car Championship.
 * 3) The interface of the menus look absolutely horrible, mainly highlighting the many generic stock photos of Australian touring cars in the background and the very poorly made buttons that seem to be made in Photoshop in less than 2 minutes, the font of the letters in the game and in the logo also look very generic, similar to the Arial or Calibri font.
 * 4) Before beginning your and besides choosing your vehicle, you can choose which real touring car driver you want to use, an option that doesn't affect the gameplay in any sense, making its addition very questionable, also, all the names of the drivers contain grammar errors, in this case, writing their names in lowercase, both first names and last names.
 * 5) The graphics can barely be considered as "graphics" because of how ugly they look. as stated before, the game is a strange mix of a racing simulator with a full-motion videogame, and the FMV element is used in the graphical section, but the problem is that the footage captured for the game has a very low resolution which only gets worse on high resolution monitors, and besides that, the sprites of the cars look even worse, as the same model is reused but with different paintjobs, giving the impression that the developers didn't bother in creating more than one vehicle model.
 * 6) The perspective is completely screwed up due to the poorly captured footage of the game, and if that wasn't bad enough, the HUD of the game is based on the cockpit of a real touring car racing vehicle, which can lead to confusion about your car's position because it's very hard to say at first sight if you're driving in first or third person.
 * 7) Not only the footage recorded for the game is of a very low quality, but it's also unfinished. When your vehicle is stopped, the footage will obviously not move to simulate that you're not advancing in he map, but when you start to accelerate, the footage will be played in a very slow speed, even if you reach the maximum speed of your vehicle, the footage will still move very slowly, causing a lot of difficulties to take curves and to overtake your rivals.
 * 8) As said in the previous point, due to the slowliness of the footage and the fact that you can't go beyond the camera allows, you can only overtake your rivals on a curve, but the problem is that overtaking your rivals on a curve is painfully hard because your rivals will usually cross in your way, causing your vehicle to crash and lose health.
 * 9) The physics are practically non-existent due to how senseless and absurd they are, when you crash to another vehicle, your car and, in some cases, your rival's car, will start spinning around like crazy in a very antinatural way, reminding a lot of those "Fly me to the moon" memes due to how stupid the game's physics are in reaction to a crash impact, all of this happening while the vehicles are still running at high speed and don't ever stop for anything in the world.
 * 10) The controls of the game are terribly sensitive and it's really hard to steer your car without crashing, and since you barely have space to maneuver in the curves due to how narrow the roads are, you will be constantly crashing against the walls or your rivals.
 * 11) The collision detection is also broken, there are many times where your vehicle will register a crash impact even if you only get a bit to the right or the left side of the screen, and it's almost for sure that this is caused by the poor footage of the game.
 * 12) The AI of your rivals is ungodly unfair and a real pain to compete against, they race much more faster than you and their vehicles will never get damaged, no matter how much they crash against your or the walls, even on the easiest difficulty level it's very hard to beat them in a race.
 * 13) To add more salt to the unfairness of the game, your vehicle gets damaged too fast, and we mean really fast, you can only crash a few times before being disqualified of the race because of the damage of your vehicle and the tires only last one and a half lap before they stop working, forcing you to go to the pit section.
 * 14) The pit section may seem as a good idea at first sight, but it's the complete opposite. Besides from the fact that it consists of an FMW footage of a few seconds where you have no control of anything, getting into the pit stop will automatically lead you to the last position, even if you are in first place, giving you an abysmal disadvantage aganst your rivals, which, of course, will never ever go to the pit section.
 * 15) The engine sound is very earraping and if many vehicles get into a same zone in the screen, the audio will screech a lot, even to the point of stunning the player if they are using headphones, what's more, the sound effect of the engine is ripped from the first NASCAR Racing game, showing up again how lazy the developers were.
 * 16) Apparently you're supposed to upgrade some parts of your car in the main menu before beginning a race, like the gearbox, the tires, the engine and the suspension, but almost all of these upgrades (if not all of them) will barely improve the performance of your car or make absoluty no change.
 * 17) Another proof that the developers were incredibly lazy and just programmed this game to win some easy dollars is that the game only contains one single track, in this case, the Bathurst circuit, and since the game has many game modes like championship and single race, you will be running on this track over and over.

Reception
Since the game was only released in Australia and it had no marketing whatsoever, it barely gained any kind of recognition in the Australian gaming community, however, a Spaniard youtuber called "RetroMierdas" rated the game with 9 turds out of 10 (The higher the number is, the crappier the game is), saying: "It's a shitty game to say the least, pure trash, send it to hell if you see it on some website, you have been warned".

Videos
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