Car & Driver plays like a flight simulator like MSFS or the Chuck Yeager series. Basically, you start the game, pick a car, pick a place to drive, and go. Cars were: Porshe 959, Toyota MR2, Ferrari F40, Lotus Esprit, Ferrari 250 Testerossa, Shelby Cobra, Lamborshini Countach, Eagle Talon, Corvette ZR-1, and Mercedes-Benz C11. You could pick from a group of tracks including a San Dimas Mall Parking Lot, a few Highways (with some secret detours on them if you're willing to race past barracades like I do), a drag strip, and probably the most interesting is the J.R. Bob Dobbs raceway, a racetrack named after the Church of the Subgenius - a mock religion popular in the 80's (especially with New Wavers like myself), complete with UFOs, low-flying aircraft, and a pretty crazy layout with all kinds of stuff. It's an early 3D game too, with polygon rendered cars with very flat textures that make them look like something straight out of Dire Straight's "Money for Nothing" music Video mixed with The Cars "You Might Think" (how fitting).

Basically, this was like a flight sim, but with cars. You just pick a car, pick a "course/track/location" and go on your way. Being able to read up on the cars and tracks beforehand in-game was something that kind of impressed me right off the bat, and not the kind of thing you could expect from a game that can run on a 386SX. Some other parts of this, that people don't mention, is some of the tracks do have some "hidden" sections, in particular, some midwestern track has a side that allows you to rip your car past a roadblock to drive a secret section of track at a penalty - but it's cool to find hidden content within a early PC driving sim.

One peculiar choice in location is the San Dimas Mall parking lot. Seriously, what am I doing in a PARKING LOT? Just seems like an odd choice for a track. Would have been nifitier if they'd done more like the "Track of the Subgenius" (J.R. Bob Dobbs Raceway, yeah, I'm into "New Wave" culture, so that mock religion is hilarious to me, and even more hilarious they included it in this game as a raceway). Maybe the Mall from "True Stories" with a 8-bit digital audio rendition of David Byrne, in a big Cowboy hat, sitting in a K-car convertible going on about the "weavers" and "metal buildings", LOL.

The choices in cars are a nice, wide variety as well, including some rather mainstream stuff like a Toyota MR-2, Eagle Talon, and a Corvette, but they have some pretty insane cars, particularly that Mercedes IMSA Racer that can do over 200mph......that's probably my favorite one in this game, just because of the sheer insanity of ripping through a Wyoming suburb at 200mph. It kind of reminds me of that scene from Last Starfighter when the police try to give Santari a ticket for speeding, and the radar is out of range, LOL.