This is another one of those highly underrated games that's a lot more fun than it looks, primarily in this case because it's so arcadish but in a fun way. Not to mention this is the same game also featured in loads of arcade stations in supermarkets in the 2000s. This is the only other game I know of besides Gran Turismo 6 that let's you drive on the moon. It was made in 2000 at the dawn of PS2 gaming so it goes without saying, it’s an old game. Got it for Christmas but I've played it many times before back when my grandfather was alive, played this game quite a lot when I came over to his place. Now that I have this game myself, I've taken a different approach to it then I did in the past & took it a bit more seriously. I decided I wanted to complete it & unlock everything without using the game's many cheats for once and that's what I spent my time doing for the first few days after Christmas, this here was the last step for me to finishing the game, simulator mode.
Where you have to race at all 17 tracks and must win at each track before you can move on to the next. I was gonna do season mode but you only race at 12 of the tracks there. Plus in simulator mode you don't get boost so it really comes down to a matter of skill which I like. Plus you get to tune parts of your car such as the wing angle, tire pressure & the shocks before each qualifying session/race which you don't get in season mode. I personally never messed with these because when I did in previous attempts at making this video, I just massively screwed up the car to where it would either barely turn or was insanely slow. And to top it all off, you're locked in the hardest driving style mode of the 4 in the game which is "expert" where you have to get accustomed to using the brakes on sharper turns where the car will then slide and you'll have to skillfully countersteer out of it while losing as little speed as possible.
Plus your car's also fastest top speed wise on "expert" anyway so you should just get used to it from the start. Winning at some tracks are downright impossible without using "expert" driving style for the extra top speed. Easier driving styles lower your car's top speed so you can pretty much take all corners from all tracks at full throttle. You'll do 229 MPH on "expert" mode, 222 MPH on “difficult” mode, 215 MPH on “medium” mode & only 207 MPH on "easy" mode. Normally you also have to use manual transmission when using "expert" driving style but the game makes an exception here in simulator mode to choose automatic as well on the car setup screen but I like using manual so I stuck with that. Thankfully you don't have to run many laps at all for these races or this would've been split up into many parts because this video's long enough as it is, 2nd longest video on the channel at the time of this posting. Timestamps for all 17 races below.
Menu - 0:00
#1 - Chicago Motor Speedway - 1:09
#2 - Airport Raceway - 5:18
#3 - Frankfurt, Germany - 9:29
#4 - Long Beach, California - 13:59
#5 - Alpine Raceway - 18:44
#6 - Rio De Janiero, Brazil - 24:31
#7 - California Raceway - 28:58
#8 - Toronto, Canada - 33:44
#9 - Houston, Texas - 38:41
#10 - Boston Big Dig - 43:37
#11 - Chicago, Illinois - 49:42
#12 - Surfers Paradise - 54:34
#13 - Miami, Florida - 59:49
#14 - The Skyway - 1:05:32
#15 - The Moon - 1:10:23
#16 - Road America - 1:16:31
#17 - New York City - 1:22:04