Hey there,
I've been pretty slow when it comes to my favorite games.
When driving is concerned, it all started with the original...
"The Need For Speed - Special Edition" - PC (yes, i know, the original was for some exotic console, still:
I'll say: it was the best nfs ever conceived - point-to-point 3-stage-races anyone?
Just shy of this praise is "NFS Porsche unleashed" (PC!!) - no other arcade driving/racing game got replayed by me as many times! Unfortunately just half a year after I got flatrate internet acces, EA took the master servers down for online-play (only to flood stores with some special edition 15€-edition diskt (with bundled audio-cd) the christmas after)... ...what a joke, EA!
Anyway: NFS-Porsche == lift-off-oversteer for the win!
EDIT2: Need for Speed 2 and Need for Speed 2 Special Edition: Those games are best NFS games ever played. ( All new ones suck as hell, Underground era too! My opinion only ofc)
Never played nfs2 with the exeption to the demo that ran abysmally slow on that P100 I was allowed to play it on. I'd say NFS 1-SE still beats it for at least perceived-realistic driving feel (judging by the nfs2-demo-experience).
Other driving games: TDU-1 ... was like running on Fakir's streets: interconnecting patches of mis-treated concrete instead of roads, well: some good keyboard fun (wheel proved to be unusable, at best). Again: game servers down, now. Mercedes Automatics had to be shifted manually!? What a bunch of BS. Needless to say I did NOT take that Piece of Junk seriously. Still: bought the steel-cover/-disk/-whatever-edition.
The other half of my youth were spent on "Die Siedler 2" by BlueByte. The original DOS-version! I have recently re-visited that in Dosbox (running on beatuiful GNU/Linux) - as I have NFS 1SE(!) - I still have kept that original CDROM(s)... I kind of suck at NFS1 nowadays. Sieder2 is just worlds too easy, once I figured its logic out.
Recently I have bought the original two "Commandos"-titles second-hand and have played them under wine (I wish I had had that pleasure much sooner: so much depth! Really rewarding to get that right!)
Oh and last but not least: Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 and '95 -> that version where every mountain looked just a uniform shade of mid-saturated green - I only new I was to close to that piece of earth after I crashed. (Pentium1-100Mhz, 32bit-S3 graphics with like 2 Mbyted RAM: good for about 64k colours at 1024x768 and like 20-something fps) -- Anyway: "surviving" the passage by VOR-flight from virtual Munich to Insbruck (one-hour flight hopefully
around those beloved green heaps of doom (=mountains) in a Cessna 172-ish): priceless!
Did I forget something? Oh yeah:
Rally Masters (as on a CD in a magazine) with the famous Gran Canaria SuperSpecial stage... ...really good fun! The rally-equivalent of NFS-Porsche, actually - fortunately not from EA. Played that on my Pentium2-300Mhz countless hours - was intense!
Richard Burns Rally: about the same time I got into LFS I discovered Richard Burns Rally: Still the best rally-simulation on the PC in terms of realism/difficulty. Hopefully some day this will get a true successor (as in the same spirit)!
Recently there has beed rfactor (although I did hesitate like 5 years to try it - bought the DVD version in late 2011 and I have enjoyed some single-player driving in it (since online is pretty much dead except for leagues and I did not yet feel comfortable enough to really compete in that).
I'll just say: Historix-GT 1.95, Sports Coupés 0.9 and every Car from Niels Heusenkvield (hope I got that name right // Corvette C6-mod, Supra MK_IV) is more than worth a trie. Forget about the ISI-supplied cars, those are awful! Everything with realfeel by design seems to give an authentic impression, forget the rest. Ah yeah: Nordschleife is epic. Just follow Niels' advice in removing any artificial bumps from those track-files, makes a huge difference on realfeel-enabled cars!
I'm sure I passed on some minor side-kicks, but for what it's worth, all really great titles I liked - I listed
Have fun!