I've played multiple racing games semi-competitively, and would like to share my experiences.

Trackmania: My current choice of racing game, Trackmania United Forever and it's counterpart, Trackmania Nations Forever, has a large userbase with a good percentage of serious players. Furthermore, the ability to create your own tracks, even in ways that weren't intended by the developers when the game was first released, gives this game replay value above and beyond any other racing game.

F-Zero series: possibly the most innovative racing game ever (most modern racing games can trace their roots back to the original F-Zero for the SNES), F-Zero was the first racing game to incorporate most modern features, like a vehicle select screen, proper collision boxes, and, of course, 3D physics (it took another year for 3D graphics to pop up on console systems). F-Zero X for the Nintendo 64 was the series high-point. Crazy yet awesome tracks that would make even a trackmania player's head spin, serious competition between players, a neat little glitch where sliding with max acceleration would make you go faster, and you get to see Captain Falcon in game.

If F-Zero X was F-Zero's golden age, then F-Zero: Maximum Velocity was it's renaissance. Getting back to the old Mode 7 engine and adding some new twists made this the GBA racing game to get. Sadly, it was also the last competitive F-Zero game made. Nintendo saw all the competitive techniques as exploits and "patched" them in more recent games, making the game more n00b friendly but also taking away from the gameplay. F-Zero is no longer in production and is being abandoned.

Mario Kart series: If there was a perfect competitive racing game, you can bet your life it doesn't have the name "Mario Kart" on the box. Probably the least skill based and most luck based racing game on the market, there is still some merit to trying this series out. Although online racing has degraded into a blue shell slugfest, Time Trials is still relatively competitive. The tracks are fun (even Double Dash's Rainbow Road), and I've even remade some of them in Trackmania. Still, Mario Kart is not one of my favorites.

Trackmania ftw. The track editor alone makes it better than any other racing game I've ever played.

Other racing games I like:

I've never played Fzero but I played the two WipEout games that are on PSP and I enjoyed them. Not enough replay value though.
I played Sonic Riders for PC. It was fun, and the AI was more challenging than most games, which I liked, but the PC version was incredibly buggy (you couldn't play certain races with certain characters or the game would crash, for example). Also it didn't have a quit button, you needed to use Alt + F4 or Ctrl Alt Delete to quit the game (if it hadn't crashed yet ). It took a long time to beat, which was sort of a plus, but you also started the game with half the game already unlocked, so not much replay value.
I liked both Lego Racers games. I liked the second one better because it had more "tracks" and the world + checkpoint system was something I hadn't seen before. Also most of the "boss 'drivers'" didn't use cars, which was fresh. It also had a split screen battle mode, where you had to destroy your opponent's car by knocking the bricks off it (the same way you could do in races). It works on XP and Vista too. But the lack of replay value means that TrackMania is still better.
I played the other racing game from Lego: Drome Racers. It was okay, but the weapon balance and the physics sucked and the bosses were way too easy. Most of the soundtrack was absolutely awesome though, and you could extract it from the game using Audacity. I'm considering reinstalling it just to get the music onto my MP3 player. I want to use the songs in some TM tracks too .

F-Zero on SNES was AWESOME

The feeling of speed that game gave was, in my mind, the predecessor to island red booster maps. But then it was like 15 years ago I last played it. That's just my memory of it.

Mario Kart 64 was the last good game from that series.

F-Zero and F-Zero X were awesome, the rest sucked.

Sonic Riders = terrible unless you're a Sonic fan. (I'm not)

Trackmania pwns all insane racing games, but in my opinion only TM Sunrise is just as much of a classic as, say, NFS III (which is a realisitc-ish arcade-physics game).

Sammon :D says...

Mario Kart 64 was the last good game from that series.

I'd hate to break up a quote, but I have to say I disagree simply because I liked Double Dash!! I still can't say it was a good game when compared to other racing games, however, and the physics were hard to get used to.

F-Zero and F-Zero X were awesome, the rest sucked.

Again, I personally liked Maximum Velocity, since it took the gameplay of the original SNES title and added to it. GP Legend and Climax were bad reboots, although Climax had an awesome level editor.

Sonic Riders = terrible unless you're a Sonic fan. (I'm not)

I agree, only to the point that I wouldn't recommend it to a non-sonic fan. It's fun the first time around (and when you play multiplayer), but after a while it gets boring.

Trackmania pwns all insane racing games, but in my opinion only TM Sunrise is just as much of a classic as, say, NFS III (which is a realisitc-ish arcade-physics game).

Tell me I've been living under a rock, but I've never played TM Sunrise. My first TrackMania game was United Forever Star Edition.

Most people haven't played TMS, so I think you're fine there.

Personally, it was the best game so far in TM. While TMU pre-Forever had the slickest GUI, Sunrise was close. It also introduced the replay editor, the skin editor, custom 3D models, Bay, Island, and Coast environments, platform mode, crazy mode (which sadly was never in a later game ), mediatracker, and a new graphics engine which made everything look much better than TMPU.

<3 TMS

Not to mention some of my favorite Nadeo tracks. Bay wasn't that great but it got worse in TMU.

We should probably speak out to say how cool Crazy mode was, it would be cool to see something like that in TM2.

I actually really enjoyed Sonic Riders once I learned how to play it. I had it on PS2 and I had been playing it for a few months. The story offers a great challenge and the whole concept I actually found a lot of fun to play.

It just takes really long to learn since it's so different, but that's what makes it interesting I think. I haven't tried the two games afterwards though.

As for F-Zero, I've always enjoyed the original game, and F-Zero X, while it gets old pretty quickly, is really fun playing it the first few times. The tracks were great and the fast gameplay was really thrilling.

I've never played F-Zero GX and even though opinions here seem unfavorable it still looks like a fun game, I wish to try it at some point. I only wonder why there hasn't been a new game for the Wii yet, the setup would probably work really well.

NinjAstar says...

I've never played F-Zero GX and even though opinions here seem unfavorable it still looks like a fun game, I wish to try it at some point.

i've heard that the higher up tracks are really hard to drive

NinjAstar says...

I've never played F-Zero GX and even though opinions here seem unfavorable it still looks like a fun game, I wish to try it at some point.

I haven't played GX either, but from what I've seen, all the grief about it is mainly from the competitive community due to the fact that it lacks the old techs like drifting and ADTD (advanced double-tap diving) seen in F-Zero X. I can understand why they removed those since they would be too hard to pull off on the arcade version of the game (F-Zero AX).

Btw, I'm trying to find one of the F-Zero AX arcade units.

I never knew about such things as ADTD. I never really played F-Zero X competitively despite doing so for other arcade style racers because of my love for such games.

There used to be 2 F-Zero AX machines at the GameWorks near where I live, but they only had them for a short time and never got a chance to play them.