Editor’s note: Be sure to check out the inaugural episode of The Dead Drop, a video review series. Episode 01 is derived from the content of this article.

It finally happened; racing game graphics have gotten so good, people with so-so eyes can no longer tell them from the real thing.

ou really haven’t seen a fanboy until you’ve seen a racing game fanboy.

In the last couple of days I discovered just how strong opinions about racing games are, and learned just how fiercely fans of a particular franchise will defend “their game”—they’re saying ‘fuck’ to each other a lot in online forums whenever Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo (the current kings of the track, on 360 and PS3 respectively) are being discussed.

“All gaming boards are like that,” you might be thinking. But this is different from the smack you find on boards about first-person shooters. There’s a rationality and a weird kind of religiousness about racing game fans, who will still call you a jizz swapper, but also educate you on the Lotus Elise’s suspension while doing it. Their grammar is a bit better than FPS fanboys and their rants are always beefed up with obscure facts; they are generally very knowledgeable about cars, AND third party steering wheel game controllers; and they are selfless—they will sacrifice their own fun in order to feel personally offended when a game’s interpretation of a Honda Civic’s second gear ratio is taller than it’s supposed to be. Because somebody has to.

The mostly-cheesy Need for Speed franchise (previously an upward nod and fist bump to street racing culture) has sucked for too long to really have its own fanboys. But maybe that will change; Publisher EA has entered the ‘sim-like racing game’ arena with Need for Speed: Shift which was released yesterday, for 360, PS3 and PC and looks and feels nothing like previous Need for Speed games. I personally like it (except for the drifting events… fuck drifting. And anything even loosely associated with The Fast and the Furious. Remember that Pop-Tarts commercial where that really annoying guy goes “Baaammm”? That’s the kind of person who likes drifting).

Not that it's a big deal or anything, but you know, I can take this wheel-shaped video game controller home any time I want.

Although, unless you count Grand Theft Auto 4, I haven’t played a lot of driving games, aside from some Virtua Racing in the arcade with my friend James back in high school (he always kicked my ass, but I could beat him at NBA Jam so it was all good), some Pole Position as a little kid (*muffled lady* Prepare to Qualify!), some Mario Kart with the girl who lived next door to me in rez, whom I was crazy about, and a few minutes here and there of random racers at friends’ houses over the years. So I might not be seasoned enough to do an adequate comparison of racers. But I can say I’m having fun playing it.

But anyway, Shift is an interesting gaming development because it kind of breaks genre. It’s not an ‘arcade racer’ (games where the laws of physics don’t apply; you drive through malls and jump through billboards while punk-pop music plays and grandmas menacingly shake their canes at you) and it’s not a pure racing simulation (in which you must brake, accelerate and navigate corners more or less how and when you would in real life, and your on-track performance can be affected by real-world complications, such as wet spark plugs or your jack man’s messy divorce)… Shift is neither.

Arcadey in the sense that you get points for driving like a jackass and even for ramming your opponent off the track—you can even bounce off walls and keep on going, but sim-like in the sense that the accelerate/brake/cornering physics are pretty realistic and you have to compete in organized events and set good lap times and progress through a career, and buy cars, which sort of behave like their real-life counterparts, Shift is pretty much a mashup of the two types.

I really liked the driving, and… what else do you want me to say about that? That’s what a driving game is about.

I really didn’t like the loading screens, and how much time I spent in menus or waiting for tracks to load, proportional to the amount of time I spent driving. People in the sim mindset might not mind, but the long waits really cramp its style as a video game. Sometimes I just want to grab a controller, run a couple of races and then go do something else. Need for Speed: Shift‘s interface isn’t really built for this, which is too bad because the driving is really really fun.

So how do the racing fanboys like it? Well, in the gaming forums around the net right now there are approximately equal numbers of Forza and GT fanboys saying it’s pretty good (with a disclaimer about it not being as good as Forza or GT), and who are united in hatred for Shift, calling it the worst piece of shit ever pressed into the shape of a disc (because it’s not Forza or GT). So it just depends on who you run into.

The critics? IGN, Gamepro and many other review sites have given it a 9.

But Gamespot only gave it a 7, with their reviewer accusing it of trying to be all things to all people but failing to fully satisfy either arcade racing fans or sim-racing fans.

I think that’s an oversimplification—mashups can be a marketing ploy, but they can also be a conscious attempt at evolution. I see this game as an attempt to make something fun for gamers, and to create fans for an entirely different genre – the arcade-sim genre. I’m sure eventually some racing fans will see it this way, too; Pure racing sim fans and arcade racing fans aren’t robots.

Ok fine, some of them are. Especially sim-racing fans. But still.

Here’s a video: