VDrift: Three confessions, an exaltation and a warning

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Okay, first of all, I have three things to admit.

1. I am not a fan of racing games.
2. I only put VDrift in the screenshot as something different.
3. Now I can’t keep my hands off it.

No kidding. I don’t play racing games. I’ve been driving for decades, and so it’s not really that appealing. I mean, if I wanted to race a car, I’d just make the arrangements and do the real thing. A racing game just isn’t far enough detached from reality to amuse my sense of imagination. And I’m not a gearhead at all, so it’s only an oblique interest to start with. Heck, I even had to look up drift racing on Wikipedia so I could figure out what it was.

But I found a deb for VDrift on GetDeb.net the other day and dropped it into the screenshot as a lark. And then I started playing a little more, and figured out how to actually drift the cars, and now I can’t quit it. It has actually dethroned Warzone 2100 as my amusement of choice. And that’s saying something.

I have to crank down the graphics a lot to make it work on my humble 64Mb Geforce4 440, but that hasn’t curbed my addiction very much. In fact, I’m kind of glad I’m stuck with a low-end card, because if my video was any better, I’d probably end up wasting a lot of time with this.

I know racing games are perennial favorites, and VDrift is not the only one available to Ubuntu/Linux users — TORCS is in the repositories, as is Trigger, but this one knocks the socks off both of those games. They’re fun, but they don’t come close to VDrift at all.

You can use the deb above to install it, but the autopackage (the .package file) off the VDrift home page is probably easier to install and downloads all the current dependencies automatically. And I’ve tried both installations and I think the autopackage might actually run faster. I have no way of proving that though.

So I heartily recommend it, but I have to warn you: If you’re even the least bit inclined toward racing games, be careful. I don’t count myself among those fans, but I’m definitely hooked on this one.