The next major game he can recall playing is ‘Planet of Death’ (P.O.D) (lots of death going on here, perhaps this indicates why he’s not averse to running amuck in FNP). With glorious, at the time, 3D graphics and deformable cars, crazy tracks and jumps, he couldn’t get enough.

That is until ‘Need for Speed: Porsche’. He’d played ‘NFS III: Hot Pursuit’ but it was too gimmicky. The Porsche iteration had (and in his mind still does) have the best driving physics to date. Every corner was a handling experience, cars pitched, rolled and slid in glorious detailed accuracy and as upgrades were made to each car, you could see and FEEL the handling difference, so much so that the older cars in the game were more fun to drive than the faster newer ones. Even the tracks had glorious scenery that you really did want to just drive around in and soak it all in. Easily his favourite racing game of all time.

He shortly thereafter made a return to F1 in ‘F1 Challenge 99-02’. He doesn’t remember much about it but can remember going off track a lot so probably gave up on it soon after. Still has two of the games theme songs in his music collection somewhere though.

The next major game he reminisces about is ‘Race driver: GRID’ from Codemasters. Sure there were some Need for Speed iterations but they weren’t anything to write home about. GRID though brought back the passion for handling and car physics in a game. Continuing on the Codemasters bandwagon he soon got into the DiRT series and eventually wound up back at F1 again in ‘F1 2010’.

Amazingly, up until shortly before F1 2010 he’d always used buttons or keyboard to control his racing pleasure. He bought a wheel back in the day for NFS: Porsche but the hassle of setting up a wheel and everything then tearing it all down again is quite the annoyance for him. He just likes being the casual racer. ‘NFS: Unleashed’ though forced his hand into buying a 360 controller just so he could get a car round the track.

So with controller in hand, that is Eradicators racing pedigree and how his previous driving experiences help him keep up with and occasionerly better the rest in the Atomic F1 competition.