The top 50 best ever driving games: 20-11

Codemasters' tenure in charge of Formula One games has been something of a mixed bag, but F1 2016 plonks the series right where it deserves to be, at the pinnacle of modern racing games. Unswervingly accurate, it somehow manages to turn the technical and regulatory bloat of 2016-era F1 into one of the most rewarding racers around. A bit like how Brian Cox manages to teach you about astrophysics without you wanting to fire your own body into the cold vacuum of space.

The overhauled career mode is more in-depth than keyhole surgery and contains a new rivals system that encourages you to mercilessly crush your teammate's spirit, ensuring you're just as riled up as Messrs Hamilton and Rosberg were this season. Alternatively, if your primary motivation is collecting salty human tears in a series of jars under your bed, there's a full 22 player multiplayer championship mode where you can enjoy that same rivalry with your real-life mates. Welcome back to the top step of the podium, Codies.

Pitched somewhere between the punishing realism of Gran Turismo and the arcadey kicks of Need For Speed, the Grid games could so easily have turned out as an ill-fitting mish-mash of wonky physics and frustrating controls. Instead, the original was one of the most well-balanced and visually spectacular racers for years, with its nifty Flashback feature (which let you rewind time to the moment just before you churlishly charged into that hairpin at 120mph) quickly adopted as a genre standard.

Guaranteed you have never seen a car chase like the ones in Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. We're not sure where Seacrest County Police Department gets its funding, but turning one of the 5 Pagani Zonda Cinques in the world into a police car, complete with siren and light bar, suggests it's some sort of justice-crazed billionaire. Has anyone checked in on Bruce Wayne recently?

Built by the people behind Burnout, Hot Pursuit has to be one of the only street racing themed games where playing as the cops is even more satisfying than the crims. Calling in choppers to deploy spike strips down the road and immobilising perps with EMP blasts are just some of the entirely proportionate responses to traffic violations available to officers on Seacrest County's sweeping highways.

Follow-up Most Wanted was a more urban, cat and mouse affair, and lacked the sheer synapse-fizzing velocity and Hollywood drama of this game, leaving Hot Pursuit fossilised in amber as the absolute peak of the Need for Speed series.

Project CARS marks the moment when an underserved sim-racing community flung its hands up in the air and said 'fine, I'll do it myself'. Built with the input of thousands of racing game fans, Project CARS attempts earnestly to please them all with a huge roster of cars and tracks and more tweakable options than a luxury car configurator.

The aim is to recreate the sort of racing career that Lewis Hamilton has experienced, from dancing karts across kerbs all the way to scything through corners in 750hp open wheelers, though it draws the line at the bit where you party with Kanye West and endlessly Snapchat pictures of your dog.

Project CARS is also heart-stoppingly beautiful if you've got the PC horsepower for it to run it at full detail and, ideally, a 4K screen. Watching the sun set at Le Mans is almost as magical as the real thing and the dynamic weather encompasses the full spectrum, all the way from bright sunshine and clear skies to the full British summertime downpour. Only a developer based in our own rain-battered isle could simulate slithering around in wet weather quite so accurately.

The series formerly known as Colin McRae has had its dalliances with Gymkhana and friend of TG Ken Block, but for Dirt Rally the series returned to its spiritual home. A Welsh forest with an unpronounceable name.

Easily the most realistic off-road racing title around, Dirt Rally is about as close to the real-life art of sideways as you'll get and there's everything from the latest World Rally weapons to Group B grenades to fling around. They all handle entirely convincingly, which isn't much consolation when you run out of talent and end up parked vertically against a tree.

Still, you'll try, try again because hustling these cars is so rewarding. Every successfully completed stage feels like a victory and when you nail the perfect slide – a huge, graceful arc around a narrow ribbon of gravel with conifer fronds gently tickling the rear wing – you'll feel like kicking down your own front door and loudly announcing to the whole street that you are a golden god. For the measly price of a game (and perhaps a new front door), these are cheap thrills indeed.

Before this came along, gamers had two options when navigating corners: you could either clatter off the barriers and earn yourself a smoking engine, or gingerly tap the brake and swear while everyone else overtook you. And while we’re not saying Ridge Racer invented drifting, this was certainly the first time it worked – and felt – as good as it should. It's also a product of an era where arcade racers whisked us past sandy beaches, gleaming metropolises and unnecessarily massive suspension bridges.

It’s a game that’s since been superseded in every way imaginable, of course, but we still remember playing it and, during a single tyre-thrashing drift, having enough time to think that things couldn’t possibly get any better.

Microsoft's racing juggernaut rolls on and gets better every year. The latest edition, Forza Motorsport 6, fixes some of the handling idiosyncrasies that spoiled the series' Xbox One bow and adds another galaxy of new cars, circuits and features.

For the first time, Forza Motorsport dips its toe into, well, the water. Wet races aren't so much wet as biblically flooded and dodging lake-sized puddles around Spa in a GTE-spec Ferrari 458 is a lesson in patience and deft throttle control. The pinnacle of the game's challenge, though, is throwing down against The Stig's digital cousin around the original TG test track. And no, it doesn't count if you just use your car as a cue ball to rear-end him off the circuit at Hammerhead.

What's more, Forza games are among the best supported after they launch, which is why we've seen the stellar Porsche pack and the fantastically jingoistic NASCAR expansion show up to supplement the base package in the 12 months following the game's release.

But even with just the standard selection, few games can match Forza Motorsport's vast scale and staggering budget. With 460 cars to choose from, all recreated down to minor imperfections in the paintwork, you'd have to be pickier than Goldilocks not to find something you want to manhandle around a track.

You've heard of method acting, right? Well Gran Turismo 6 director Kazunori Yamauchi is a method game developer. One weekend every May, you'll find him thrashing around the Nurburgring in a GT3 car during the 24 hour race in an attempt to better understand vehicle dynamics. Eat your heart out Christian Bale.

Yamauchi's naked obsession with cars and motorsport seeps into every corner of the sprawling Gran Turismo 6, the most recent in the series until GT Sport arrives next year. With 1200 vehicles to choose from, whether you're after obscure but beautiful racing machinery, iconic road cars or NASA's lunar buggy, if it has four wheels and a pedal that causes them to rotate in a forward direction, it's probably buried in Gran Turismo 6 somewhere.

In spite of publisher Atari's claims of “unbelievable driving realism”, as F1 simulations go, playing this arcade classic is about as realistic as violently jerking your head from side to side in front of a hair dryer. Even so, Pole Position remains a true pioneer – it was the first racing game to include a qualifying session and the first to feature a real world circuit in Japan’s Fuji Raceway.

Its smooth, fast pseudo 3D graphics propelled it to the title of highest-grossing arcade game in 1983 and it even spawned a Saturday morning cartoon that bore literally zero resemblance to the game beyond its title. But don't get us wrong, there was some F1 authenticity – just check out the trackside ads for fags and fizzy drinks brands. Enjoy, kids!

Despite being a relatively new kid on the block, Italian-built simulator Assetto Corsa has somehow already snagged the coveted licenses to include Ferrari, Lamborghini and, as of this year, Porsche. We'd be open-mouthed in awe, but stranger things have definitely happened in 2016.

AC is still far smaller in scope than behemoths like Forza and Gran Turismo but its physics engine, which dishes out driveable oversteer with a carbon-fibre ladle, means that every lap is a gloriously physical, characterful hustle. You know a game has gotten things right when you don't even make it to the race itself because you spent hours hot-lapping in practice only to discover it's 3am on a Tuesday morning. And you started on Sunday night.