Following last week's decision to get a USB H-shifter peripheral for my racing wheel, I found myself with a new dilemma: finding games that would make good use of it.
Enter our readers and listeners with the suggestion of Assetto Corsa, which quickly won the hearts of sim racers when it came out over a decade ago and which remains enormously popular in part because of a massive modding community. To varying degrees of execution, people have added thousands of cars to that game's potential library, along with hundreds of tracks.
For someone who plays mostly on PC, I've never been hugely into modding. Part of it is that a game reviewer usually moves on from a game long before its mod scene approaches maturity. The bigger hurdle for me personally is that few things can introduce analysis paralysis like sifting through an extensive library of mods.
To be clear, the Assetto Corsa community has made all this as painless and even pleasurable as possible. The AC Content Manager is a marvel, making the experience of downloading and activating mods a two-click process. There is no technical hurdle that's causing me problems. Instead it's, uh… this.
Look on my options dialogs and despair!
Alt-text might be broken on these gallery images, but the gist is that every part of the options UI has a panel that shows about 30 different options menus that expands out into a huge page of incredibly granular settings for how the game handles rendering, reflections, light sources, camera movement, legacy features, grass effects, particles... neck FX (I think it's a VR thing)? And then every car model in the game has tons of extra detail about exactly where it's sourcing its information from and where you can substitute different sets of files to tune it just right. A single options menu here has more choices and sliders listed than you find in the entirety of most other games.
Navigate your way past this and you find another dilemma: which of the thousands of potential cars you can drive do you want to drive? Which of those hundreds of user-made cars are actually correctly modeled and which are crude reskins of other car models? Are you sure you don't want to download a different file for the engine noise the car is supposed to make?
I love it, but I'd also say I've spent roughly three times as much time poring over patches and mod files than I have behind the wheel. Diving into a game with an extensive mod history and selection feels a bit like going to the library or a book store when you want to read a book. You end up dragging 25 books back to a table and leafing through all of them for a few minutes rather than actually reading any of them, because somewhere along the line the entire trip became about finding stuff that could be interesting. Later. In that copious amount of spare time that you don't have.
—Rob
Library-Tier Podcast (July 20, 2026): HOA, “Driving Towards a Dream” — Patrick and I answered questions and discussed a real Kobayashi Maru scenario submitted to us by a reader wherein they asked whether one is obliged to share cursed knowledge with someone when it can no longer guide them to a better decision. Hopefully our input could heal this rift.
Podcast (July 21, 2026): Sports!, “World Cup Fever” — Janet and Rob discuss the end of the World Cup, the absolute banger FIFA commissioned for closing ceremonies, and where her bottomless thirst for soccer can be slaked next. Rob discusses the fact that the governing body of cycling tested the second-best cyclist in the world at 2AM and the next day he immediately crashed and broke his collarbone.
Stream: Pokopia, “Ditto Day” — Chia and Janet (grudgingly) build houses and do jobs on their shared island.
Article: Samuel Horti, “Super Mega Baseball and the Quest for the Perfect Game” – Is there a better baseball game than Super Mega Baseball 4? Samuel Horti’s not sure there is, and has been playing it extensively since it came out three years ago, finding a magic and truthfulness in it that MLB The Show cannot come near matching. In this article, he makes his case for why the most whimsical of baseball games is also the most accurate to the sport, and how he might owe its existence to EA despite the fact they almost certainly are the reason developer Metalhead will never make anything like it again.
Podcast: Remap Radio 146, “Entomology Etymology” — Did I spell that right? I have no idea. Every time I type either of those words it’s a white-knuckle experience. Not unlike the situation that gave the episode its name, where my bedroom suffered a Souls-like invasion by a wasp.