Fancy yourself as a virtual Valentino Rossi? Reckon you could beat John McGuinness around the TT course from the comfort of your sofa? If the answer to either question is yes, you’d better plan on cancelling your social life for the rest of 2017.
From the days of Super Hang On and Road Rash to the current crop of simulators, motorcycles have always made interesting subjects for computer games – and this year there are a trio of potential blockbusters coming to satisfy even the most discerning armchair racer.
Out this Friday is the eagerly anticipated MotoGP17. As the name suggests, it’s the official video game of the MotoGP World Championship and allows you to play as, or against, virtual versions of the world’s fastest racers, including Rossi, Maverick Vinales and Marc Marquez.
As in previous years, Italian software house Milestone has painstakingly recreated the various bikes and tracks from the championship and covers the Moto2 and Moto3 classes as well as the top series.
Just like before, you can play a single race, a full championship or take on a career mode, where you start at the bottom in a lowly Moto3 team, getting offers of better bikes in bigger championships as your results improve. A new addition to the 2017 version of the game is that career mode can start in the Red Bull Rookies, a KTM-powered one-make series for 13-18 year olds. Also new is a team manager mode that, as the name suggests, sees you trying to get results from the other side of the pit wall.
As always, MotoGP17 can be played as an easy short lap race or a rock hard simulator where all the various sessions are accurately played out in real time. It’s out this Friday (June 15), on the Xbox One and Playstation 4.
If MotoGP’s just a bit too mainstream, it might be work waiting for the new Isle of Man TT game, called Ride on the Edge. The new game, out towards the end of the year, accurately depicts the monumental 37.73 mile Isle of Man TT course.
No exact release dates are available yet, but a beta version was available to play during last week’s TT festival, with several playable sections. Fans of real road racing have been waiting almost a decade for a new TT game and it looks to tick all the boxes, with a lot of work having gone into accurately recreating the circuit, riders and motorcycles. It’s still quite some way from being completed, but it should definitely be one for the Christmas list, that’s for sure.
And if dirt bikes are more your kind of thing, MXGP 3 has just been released. This is the official game of the FIM Motocross World Championship and, like MotoGP17, features all the real life tracks, riders and bikes recreated in digital form. Like the MotoGP game, it has been developed by Italian company Milestone, whose Ride series of games are also available and feature computer incarnations of classic and modern road bikes.