Title: Racing Boss
Original title: F1Time
Year introduced: 2001
Country of origin: Lithuania
Languages: English
Price: free
Established as F1Time (later renamed to Racing Boss due to obvious copyright reasons) this game was one of the early car racing games online. Created in 2001 by enthusiasts from Lithuania F1Time quickly gained a reputation for being challenging and having interesting way of presenting race results.
One of the unusual approaches to the genre was that it put player not in charge of the whole team, but sort-of "half team" - you were running your own garage with one car and one driver, but game was pairing you with another user so together you could be a whole team. This had some drawbacks, if you were paired with someone inexperienced or inactive you might have lose interest in the game pretty quickly.
Another interesting bit was the approach to car setup - there was very little help available, so in your first season you were mostly guessing how to prepare your car for the race, in consecutive seasons you could have used experience from previous year as a guideline (if you stored your data outside of the game of course), which gave the more experienced users the edge, yet it was challenging.
Race results for each lap were presented in form of icons of the cars separated from each other by the distance the drivers were from each other on the track, which was a nice touch, although if you were really lagging behind rest of the cars you had to scroll a lot to finally see how your driver is doing.
With years the game gained a followers and devoted users, several times was improved and rebuilt, but unfortunately with each change the game was further and further from atmosphere of the original. For example in current version (2018) in whole game you can’t actually see your car anywhere - even during setup or sponsorship talks there are no cars in sight. The practice laps are limited to 12 before each Grand Prix, which is hardly enough when you have to determine a right choice for 10 different parameters.
While still impressive due to long lifespan Racing Boss (previously F1Time) is now only a shadow of former glory with incoherent interface and gameplay that lacks, above all, any sort of fun that could be linked with running your own team.
Rating: 3 / 5 based on 1 votes
★★★☆☆
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