F-1

When you bought a sound card in 1989, you wanted to hear it in every game. In F-1 from 1991, there's nothing special about it — just engine noise and a few sound effects. The game was released by someone nameless, and you can tell on every piece.

It's an arcade formula on MS-DOS, where you get into a car and drive around circuits for exactly as long as you play. There's no story, no career, no progression system. Just you, your car, and the road. The goal is to drive as fast as possible and stay on the track — that's all the game offers, and I have to say it barely cuts it.

The graphics are tolerable for the era — simple polygonal shadows of little cars, flat landscape that you see a few meters ahead. The controls are basic: gas, brake, turning. The car physics have some substance, but you don't feel any elegance in them. It's more like driving heavy noodles. When you crash into a rival or drive off the track, you know you're an idiot, but not because the game is hungry for your mistakes — you're just clumsy.

Looking back, F-1 can't be counted among the games that shaped formula racing. It wasn't part of a larger tradition or a trend. It simply existed, someone played it for a while, and forgot about it. For its time it was neither particularly worse nor better — just average, like dozens around DOS computers.

Today you play it only out of curiosity or when an old game's name comes up in conversation with friends and you want to know what it was like. Try it in a browser if you want to spend fifty minutes condemning the life of something unremarkable, but not vulnerably evil. It's not a fake, but it's not the seed of anything great either.