''TOCA World Touring Cars'' is a 2000

racing video game Racing games are a video game genre in which the player participates in a racing competition. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to fantastical settings. They are distributed along a spectrum between more realistic raci ...

developed and published by

Codemasters The Codemasters Software Company Limited (trade name: Codemasters) is a British video game developer and former publisher based in Southam, England, which is a subsidiary of American corporation Electronic Arts and managed under the EA Sports ...

for

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

and

Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, and to international markets that June. It was later released in mainland China in 2004, under the name iQue Game Boy Advanc ...

. It is the third game in the ''TOCA'' series. ''TOCA World Touring Cars'' features various Touring Car championships from around the world, but despite carrying the TOCA name, a fully licensed British Touring Car Championship (TOCA) series was not included. This upset a lot of fans of the series, but success continued. The gameplay overall became more "Arcade" and the replacement of qualifying laps with random grid positions together with the omission of penalties for bad driving made the game much more playable for the casual gamer. Curiously, unlike the first two titles in the ''TOCA'' series, ''World Touring Cars'' was not released in a

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

version. For the North American market, the game was released as ''Jarrett & Labonte Stock Car Racing'', with the cover art featuring

NASCAR The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, LLC (NASCAR) is an American auto racing sanctioning and operating company that is best known for stock car racing. It is considered to be one of the top ranked motorsports organizations in ...

drivers Jason Jarrett and Justin Labonte.

Reception

The game received "favourable" reviews according to the

review aggregation A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...

website

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

. In Japan, where the PlayStation version was ported and published by Spike under the name on 9 November 2000, ''

Famitsu , formerly , is a line of Japanese Video game journalism, video game magazines published by Kadokawa Game Linkage (previously known as Gzbrain), a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, Kadokawa. ''Famitsu'' is published in both weekly and monthly f ...

'' gave it a score of 27 out of 40. The PS version was a bestseller in the UK, replacing ''

WWF SmackDown! ''WWE SmackDown'', also known as ''Friday Night SmackDown'' or simply ''SmackDown'', is an American professional wrestling television program produced by WWE. It airs live every Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) on USA Network in the United ...

''. In the media, once again the franchise was compared to the '' Gran Turismo'' series and ''TOCA'' was warmly received by much of the specialist press, most notably scoring 10 out of 10 in '' Official UK PlayStation Magazine''. The detailed and smooth graphics were of particular praise, and it had "an ideal mix of driving, crashing and career progression". The same console version was a runner-up for ''

GameSpot ''GameSpot'' is an American video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information on video games. The site was launched on May 1, 1996, created by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady, and Jon Epstein. In addition ...

''s annual "Best Driving Game" award among

console game A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can typically be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connec ...

s, losing to '' Test Drive Le Mans''.

Notes

References

External links