The Top 7... Fastest games of all time

1. Extreme G 3

Extreme G III is never slow. Even the initial speed classesblow its N64 ancestors clean out of the water. But as you progress, you earn faster bikes and bigger engines. It takes a while, which is lucky because it's hard enough to avoid the walls even at 300mph.

A few hours in, you hurtle down a slope, picking up speed until, suddenly, everything goes quiet. You've passed 1236kph and broken the sound barrier. You're now travelling faster than the sound of your own engine, which is pretty damn fast. Kinda like controlling Concorde with handlebars. While firing off rockets with your bell thumb.

Above: You might as well be racingthis -the speed and concept are identical

But what does this kind of speed look like in-game? Answer: This:

The lack of an Extreme G game on current gen is frankly criminal. If a game can run this smoothly and look this good on PS2, imagine what a PS3 version could look like. Sadly, Acclaim died out after releasing the disappointing sequel, XGRA. Sloppy handling and a duff framerate spoiled all the thrills, leaving us to fondly fap over this PS2 gem. Let's have another video.

How fast is it? The speed gauge tops out at 999mph. So that's literally 1,000 miles an hour. That's faster than the combined bark (761mph) of a greyhound (45mph) with a hedgehog strapped to each foot (15 x 4 mph), who's running along the world's fastest rollercoaster (128mph). That's damn fast.

How fast does it feel? Like you're going at a thousand miles an hour. Duh.

Above: "Why, this game is systematic... hydromatic... why it's Extreme G-reased lightnin'!" (Booo! - everyone)

However...

There is one more thing that should be noted. While plenty of sci-fi games feature the 'jump to lightspeed' which automatically wins in terms of scientific speed, we can't feature the 'fastest games of all time' without mentioning Gran Turismo 3's famous glitch. Combining an out-of-course barrier glitch with a specific car set-up, air gets under the car leaving the rear wheels free to accelerate into oblivion. Ironically, given the hard time it had in the intro to this feature, the result technically makes GT3 the fastest racing game on any console, as your modded car tops a staggering two billion mph. That's 3.2 times the speed of light, meaning this car is technically travelling backwards through time.

That's what's known in the trade as 'quite fast'.

09 Aug, 2010

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