all i want for christmas is an unrealistic racing game (gay)

i’m not an especially sports person. the only one i like playing myself (indeed, the only sort of exercise i’ve ever enjoyed) is badminton, and i don’t watch a lot of sports. i do like sports stories, but that’s largely insofar as they are vehicles for stories about people and relationships in the pressure-cooker of competitive sport. see Ping-Pong, Black Swan (and Love Doctor), and, the one that started the train of thought that led to this chost, Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw.

Aquamarine begins with our protagonist, an Olympic swimmer, taking second place to the girl she slept with the night before:

In the hundreds of events she has swum on the way to this one, this split second in which she can see the race ahead completely, and see herself winning it, has given her an edge.

This time, though, the power of belief slips away, just a little. Just for the microslice of a second it takes for her to look over at Marty. Who does, for a flash instant, look back. But, through her goggles and then Marty’s, and with the sun behind her blacking her out, Jesse can’t read her face. She is still trying to deciper it, to pull some important message off it, still trying to link today with last night, to figure out the connection between those events and this one. While she is temporarily lost in this constellation of fear and exhilaration and squeezed hope, the starter’s pistol, which she is supposed to respond to instinctively, as though it’s inside her, goes off in some very faraway place. Taking her completely by surprise.

this moment of hesitation defines the rest of her life; the novel continues by spinning out three possible futures for Jesse, all beginning and ending the same way: wondering if Marty slept with her in order to win, and wanting her just the same.

this is all a long way of saying i want a racing game where you can seduce your opponents to throw them off their game, ok? it should be unrealistic, melodramatic, and silly, because, like sports anime, that’s what a driving game should be. the best driving game of all time is, after all, perfect park. (friction? gravity? think of them as suggestions. it’s true there isn’t much melodrama in perfect park, unless you count my wailing and gnashing of teeth when BeastModeChewy beat all my best times.)