2016's seven greatest gaming moments

Last year we pronounced 2015 the year of the racing game, when the seemingly declining genre had seen an explosion of brilliant, creative racers, from hardcore sims to freewheeling arcade fare. 2016 by contrast has been the year of shock political results, but for the good of our final shred of sanity we've merrily blocked out the noise with a succession of excellent racing games.

Having already indisputably settled the 50 greatest racing games of all time, let's get on with our gaming highlights from 2016...

2016 offered console gamers the opportunity to sample two of the most sophisticated sims on the market and discover exactly what their PC-owning brethren had been raving about. Both Dirt Rally and Assetto Corsa landed on telly-tethered games boxes this year and lost very little in their translation.

Dirt Rally's uncompromising approach to the sport of high speed gravel rearrangement is a far cry from the colourful, knockabout action of previous Dirt games, but it makes simply finishing a stage with all four wheels on your wagon a moment of fist-pumping elation. And if you manage not to come dead last, well, let's just remind you that running fully nude through the street loudly declaring your own brilliance remains a crime of indecency in the United Kingdom.

Similarly Assetto Corsa comes out of a tiny Italian development studio but managed to haul its way to consoles this year. It's a streamlined but expertly curated package of road and circuit machinery with a pliant handling model that positively encourages oversteer heroics. Whether it's the hypercar holy trinity, GT3 racers or even a smattering of F1 machinery, Assetto Corsa takes a little and does an awful lot with it.

2016 also offered news that racing game fans have been waiting for for decades. An ill-advised twenty year exclusivity deal that ensured EA had first refusal on Porsches appearing in other games should be expiring right about the moment you're reading this.

And like desert flowers blooming after a drought-breaking rainstorm, or some such poetic nonsense, expect to see 911s, 917s and 919 Hybrids cropping up in all sorts of games. Assetto Corsa was able to jump the gun via special arrangement this year and has three downloadable packs of Ferry's finest available right now, but we reckon you'll see them added to Forza Horizon 3, the anticipated Project CARS sequel and perhaps even GT Sport.

The only downside? Well someone might want to pop round to RUF and give them all a bit of a hug. The company's BTRs and CTRs have had a good run as proxy Porkers since Gran Turismo 2 came up with the wheeze back in 1999. Can't see them being quite so in-demand now...

Forget your week in Benidorm where you came back the colour of a Royal Mail postbox, for around 40 notes you could have bought Forza Horizon 3 and been whisked away on an automotive holiday that money could buy, but only if it was lots and lots of money.

Horizon 3 really moved out of the shadow of the main Forza Motorsport series this year, properly committing to a more drifty handling model and offering pure arcade rather than simulation kicks. This isn't trying to sell you reality, it's trying to sell you a fantasy. Specifically, that one where you drift a Lamborghini Centenario around the sweeping bends of the Gold Coast highway while listening to the lady from CHVRCHES noodling away on the stereo. Surely that's not just us?

We've spent the last year trotting out a series of increasingly clumsy analogies in an attempt to describe how virtual reality places you inside the game with uncanny effectiveness. They're all inadequate, because you really do need to try it yourself, but hopefully with each one we're gradually inching closer to helping you understand the difference between regular gaming and VR. This time it's music: if the original DriveClub is the album version, then DriveClub VR is front row at the live show with your face pressed up against the speaker stack.

While PC gamers have had VR technology in one form or another for a few years now, PlayStation VR, released this year, is the most affordable and accessible way to sample the technology. It helps that there's substantial racing game available for the technology right now, filled with millimetre-perfect supercars and exotic stretches of asphalt on which to test them. If, as for us, getting your hands on a real Pagani Huayra would require the sale of several essential organs on the black market, sitting in DriveClub VR's detailed replica might be the better option for your continuing health.

There can't be many sports that increase in complexity every single year, but Formula One somehow seems to manage it. In its 2016 configuration, you'd need a Masters degree in VCR programming just to get the thing off the line at the start of a race.

The F1 2016 game's greatest triumph is that it manages to turn most of that complexity into interesting gameplay elements that need to be balanced throughout the race, but without getting too bogged down in the nerdiness of the whole thing. The result is not just an authentic recreation of the sport but the most enjoyable racing game based on F1 in ages.

Our favourite feature though is rivals mode, which takes inspiration from the porcelain egos of our racing heroes. Throughout your career as a virtual driver, the game tracks your results, fastest laps and qualification results against a rival, allowing you not just to beat him but comprehensively demolish him over the course of a season. Better yet, if you're playing a multiplayer championship, that player will be a real human weeping real tears. Who says videogames don't bring people together?

A late arrival on this list, being released in November, Gear Club is a new iOS and Android racer from the studio behind Test Drive Unlimited and, if you're hoary and old enough to remember them, the V-Rally games. It has a more modest garage than Real Racing 3, with fewer really high end manufacturers, but makes up for it with satisfying, weighty handling and crisp visuals.

According to the developer, it's the most sophisticated recreation of these cars in a mobile game, even going as far as to accurately model the individual engines, drivetrains, suspension and aero of each vehicle. Of course, whether you can actually feel all that mathematics when you're controlling it by awkwardly tilting a mobile phone and mashing the accelerator with your thumb is another matter, but the important thing is it's extremely satisfying to blast around the game's selection of scenic open-road routes regardless.

Like most of these free-to-download mobile games, Gear Club attempts to gently irritate you into spending actual money to speed up your progress, but actually it's less pushy than most in this regard, meaning you can happily gobble up your tedious commute with slick, polished racing without spending a penny.

Forza Horizon 3 might have been eating up the headlines this year, but last year's Forza Motorsport 6 had its moments too. Chief among them was the downloadable NASCAR expansion, which saw the traditionally straight-laced simulator completely lose its mind. How else can you explain an 850hp stock car with the aerodynamic profile of a shipping container racing, and beating, a hybrid powered Le Mans prototype?

Still, if it's a choice between that and a realistic simulation of 500 miles around Daytona's oval with the throttle pinned, we'd take the fantasy mash-up NASCAR World Tour mode any day. Other racing series that get their faces kicked in by this automotive remake of Team America include GT3 and Australian V8 Supercars – it's jingoistic nonsense, but it's enormously entertaining jingoistic nonsense, even for people who couldn't give a monkey's about the sport of NASCAR.

So yes, this is motor racing by way of professional wrestling and Forza Motorsport 6 is the last place we'd expect to see this sort of thing, which is exactly why the NASCAR expansion was guaranteed a spot on our list of 2016 videogame highlights. Here's to an equally surprising, eventful and occasionally totally barmy 2017...