Street Legal

Street Legal is a 2002 racing game developed by Invictus Games and published by Activision. It was released in 2002. The game itself has a heavy emphasis on customization, maintenance and illegal street racing.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The handling model is rather clunky and some cars are prone to snap-oversteer such as the Kuruma (Chevrolet Camaro Mk.IV) and Badge (Dodge Charger R/T) even in the first gear!
 * 2) Excessive wheelspin in the first three or four gears.
 * 3) Abysmal graphics even by 2002 standards (comparable to Midtown Madness, which was released in 1999) with a very noticeable, yet pathetic draw distance.
 * 4) Due to the game's coding at the time, the framerate is rather poor regardless of the patches.
 * 5) Terrible, unrealistic physics, which will cause your car to bounce and even damage your performance.
 * 6) Awful damage system, as the exterior parts will easily fall off even with the slightest bump. For some reason, you can't easily total your car by crashing into a wall or oncoming traffic at 158 MPH! (The only exceptions are the solid props like trees and lamp posts).
 * 7) Dull soundtrack.
 * 8) The career mode is too short and can be beaten in under two hours (especially when speedrunning) without losing a single race.
 * 9) The AI is very mediocre and are slower than the player most of the time depending on the horsepower. Their only advantage is the rubberband AI, despite being impractical for them if you set the traffic density option to medium or high, as they also have a bigger risk of wrecking their car. Also, during the races, they barely take shortcuts and can be decimated by the player while the latter races through a more effective and quicker route.
 * 10) *The police aren't anything better and are also being massive nuisances as they'll chase you down easily due to the implemented rubberband AI. The same thing also happens if you're driving in faster roads below the speed limit.
 * 11) The car dealership is RNG-based and some of the higher tier cars are underpowered compared to cheaper ones that occasionally have better performance and horsepower.
 * 12) You can't fix all parts at once and you're forced to take each item to the repair bin and pay a fee to restore their condition to 100%. However, if you try to fix the chassis after removing all of the engine, body and running gear parts, it will start to move by itself and as the result, the chassis can take damage while inside the garage, making it nigh-impossible to fully restore the car!
 * 13) The patches are broken and attempting to use them will not work, making the game impossible to patch.
 * 14) If you attempt to change the music, there's a big chance where the game will crash.
 * 15) *Also, after beating the career mode, if you save the progress and later load the said file, the game will also crash. That's right! Once it's done, it will always crash which means you'll have to start all over again!
 * 16) The final boss, Marc O'Connor is laughably bad and anti-climatic as his Yotta (Toyota Supra Mk.IV) is rather underpowered compared to other cars and his race can be easily beaten like a breeze.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The concept about illegal street racing while maintaining the vehicle's condition in a realistic manner is very good, even though the sequel handled it a lot better.
 * 2) Decent amount of customization.
 * 3) Its sequel, Street Legal Racing: Redline, was a very noticeable improvement over the original.
 * 4) A good number of cars to drive (while some of them return in the sequel, especially in the 2.3.1 version) such as Duhen Ninja (Honda Civic), MCA Stallion (Ford Mustang Mk.IV), PFAA Whisper (Dodge Viper) and PFAA Naxas (Honda NSX).
 * 5) You can play your own music by putting MP3 files in each directory within the "music" folder, despite the risk of crashing the game when changing it.
 * 6) The upcoming REVision Steam re-release (hopefully) fixes (almost) all of the problems mentioned plus adding new stuff such as widescreen support, the ability to walk around anywhere, not just the part shop, and a new game engine which supports mods.