The top 50 best ever driving games: 50-41

Cel-shaded graphics aren’t the most obvious of visual treatments for serious racing games, mainly because they make everything look cartoony and Japanese - the gaming equivalent of a Nissan Micra being driven through a sushi bar by Hello Kitty. However, proving our previous sentence to be utter rubbish is this surprising game, which plays so well that you soon forget you’re basically steering and skidding your way through a manga comic. A fine blend of arcadey kicks with technical bits for the fiddle-happy.

With duff steering and 12 minutes of battery power coming as standard, the quality of radio-controlled cars in the late ‘80s was basically appalling. Luckily, there were alternatives, like this brilliantly chaotic racer, which handled, sounded and – even with 8-bit graphics – looked better than the real thing. It may seem a tad primitive today, but as one of the first racers to feature power-ups, its influence shouldn’t be under-estimated. Without this, we’d probably all be maintaining a sensible speed and apologising every time we dinged an opponent’s wing mirror.

This 1991 top down racing game has a career mode that, we'd venture, hasn't been surpassed in racing games since. In addition to racking up your championship points, against such legendary drivers as 'Ayrton Sendup' and 'Crashard Banger', you also have to busy yourself badgering your sponsor for more funding, avoiding the attention of environmental activists and rolling the solicitors of wealthy relatives for extra dough. It's like Derek Trotter, the motor racing years.

What's more in the very lightly sanctioned world of Super Cars II, if your driving skills aren't quite up to scratch, simply bolt some homing missiles onto the front of your thinly veiled Alfa Romeo SZ and point them at the car in front's exhaust pipe. No matter how much ordnance you pack, you will still have to contend with the precision jumps, blind tunnels and unstoppable freight trains that pepper the various circuits, though. Perhaps Formula One could learn a thing or two?

Before Sega Rally came along, this was as realistic as arcade rally games got. World Rally opted for a top-down view but benefited massively from a main sprite that was digitised directly from photos of a Toyota Celica GT-Four. Or at least photos of a scale model of a Toyota Celica GT-Four, it's difficult to tell at this resolution.

World Rally also had some fantastically throaty digitised audio samples for the engine and when you dropped your pound coin into the machine you were treated to exactly the same start-up sound that Carlos Sainz Snr would have heard at the start of a day at the office. When everything else in the bowling alley was pumping out bleeps and bloops, this was a pretty big deal.

The cabinet only had a single pedal, the accelerator, but frankly that's all that was required to initiate the biggest slides this side of a Floridian water park. Your little toybox Celica whistled around increasingly rapid-fire sequences of chicanes, hairpins and, the rally car's natural enemy: big piles of logs.

Ask any ‘80s child what they wanted to be when they grew up and chances are they’d say ‘racing driver’ followed by ‘spy’. This top-down arcade classic combined the world’s two most glamourous vocations into one, becoming an instant classic in the process. The aim was simple: weave through oblivious commuters and take out the bad guys using oil slicks, smoke screens and good old bullets, all to a pared-down, looping soundtrack of the Blues Brothers’ Peter Gunn theme tune. Great stuff.

‘So the car’s sort of like a hot-rod, but the tracks are all like roller coasters, and when you fire the turbo it looks like you’re pushing a barbecue down a hill.’ Now, we weren’t there, but that’s pretty much how we imagine racing game legend Geoff ‘Grand Prix’ Crammond pitched this far-out effort to publishers Microprose. Luckily, sly old Geoff made the whole thing 3D and so not only was Stunt Car Racer a great game but, this being the late ‘80s, he somehow managed to escape being burnt as a witch.

Sometime in the late ‘90s, being the bad guy suddenly became gaming’s bag in a massive way. Alongside Grand Theft Auto, this was one of the games that made it happen, pitching you as a fearless getaway driver pulled right from a ‘70s heist movie.

For some, though, the storyline-driven missions were just a sideshow, with the real draw being the opportunity to - for the first time - tear through faithful-ish 3D renderings of New York, LA, San Francisco and Miami. Wallowy suspension, errant hubcaps and alley-ways that were liberally cluttered with destructible boxes made this the definitive Hollywood car chase simulator.

The racing game that took the rule book, tore it up, set it on fire, fed the ashes to a duck and then fired the duck into space. Think flying camper vans. Think hot hatches plummeting into the Grand Canyon and something that looks like a Smart Car but for various legal reasons isn’t a Smart Car knocking down skittles. Think quite good graphics and decent loading times. What you’ve just been thinking about is Top Gear Stunt School Revolution – the best mobile game since Angry Birds (nothing’s better than Angry Birds, obviously).

Yep, we’re being totally serious here. Never mind the fact the engine sounds like digital flatulence, never mind the boozy handling, never mind the fact that they probably only called it Night Driver because black was the only colour they could make the background - if it wasn’t for games like this leading the way, we’d never have had Forza or Gran Turismo. We'll conveniently overlook the fact that the car wasn’t even part of the on-screen display, but rather a plastic overlay fitted to the inside of the cabinet – after all, Night Driver is older than Star Wars.

The fact that this was released in the same year as the all-conquering Super Mario Kart could go some way to explaining why this racer slipped by relatively unnoticed. The vehicle variety was one of the game's strongest points, with hovercraft, tanks and monster trucks all handling noticeably differently. The weapons were similarly satisfying, with rockets, oil slicks and mines at your disposal to turn foes into smouldering piles of debris. It also packed in a killer soundtrack, as the name suggests.