{"id":1841009,"date":"2026-03-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1841009"},"modified":"2026-03-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T21:00:00","slug":"anime-geeks-in-milan-have-developed-a-bold-weird-new-racing-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1841009","title":{"rendered":"Anime geeks in Milan have developed a ‘bold, weird’ new racing game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re probably more accustomed to exacting two-wheeled racing sims from Italian studio Milestone than anime-infused, futuristic arcade car races. It\u2019s been at the helm of the\u00a0MotoGP<\/em> series since 2013, but its earliest release as Graffiti Games in 1995 was a rip-roaring racer named, er,\u00a0Screamer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This 2026 spiritual sequel does share some DNA with that debut. The exaggerated drifts and pure arcade thrills are a constant, but what\u2019s really striking about\u00a0Screamer<\/em> 2026 is all the ways it\u2019s different. Not just to the original game, but to any other racer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cOne way to go could have been to make it in a nostalgic, lo-fi way,\u201d says development & creative director Michele Caletti. \u201cBut that would be a very limited scope, only for those who remember\u00a0Screamer\u00a0<\/em>[1995].<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200aWe wanted to make a game that stands out, that feels and looks memorable and with a strong identity\u00a0in a world where racing games look too much like a copy of each other. [There are] too few ideas being thrown into new titles.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is not a problem\u00a0Screamer<\/em> has. While the rest of the genre squabbles about who can build the most accurate Nordschleife, here\u2019s a game that\u2019s narrative-led, melds dystopian storytelling with character-led gameplay, and makes you drift your car with twin-stick controls.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started with very bold premises,\u201d says Caletti. \u201cBut years on, I think we delivered on those premises.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The development team are all anime geeks, he tells us. Having grown up with that visual palette, they realised it almost never appears in racing games. Channeling that artistic inspiration into\u00a0Screamer\u00a0<\/em>allowed the team to \u201cpour some very specific taste into the game\u201d. It also gave them a way into a story.<\/p>\n

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There are too few ideas being thrown into new titles<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s unusual about this game isn\u2019t that it has a story \u2013 see\u00a0F1<\/em>\u2019s Braking Point,\u00a0TOCA: Race Driver\u2019<\/em>s soap opera,\u00a0JDM<\/em>\u2019s comic panels \u2013 but that the story and gameplay are so intertwined. Team races get you thinking about strategy, and about each racer\u2019s strengths, in their head and their machinery. Most noticeable is the way its characters are written, in an idiosyncratic style that feels like a declaration of war against cliches.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always the same tropes,\u201d says Caletti. \u201cA youngster with an older master\u2026 Someone who\u2019s had a bad crash and wants this youngster to fulfil his broken dreams. Or some illegal street racing underdogs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Screamer\u2019s racers purposefully don\u2019t look like racers, Caletti tells us. They\u2019re drawn from a wider spectrum of archetypes than you\u2019d ordinarily find in a game \u2013 particularly an arcade racing game \u2013 and each feature sharply drawn motivations and connections with one another. That gives the team race events an additional interesting wrinkle.<\/p>\n

It probably helps Milestone to take such a confident approach to this game that its last four-wheeled arcade racer series, Hot Wheels: Unleashed<\/em>, was such a hit. \u201cWithout Hot Wheels<\/em>, there could be no Screamer<\/em>,\u201d Caletti says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe learned you have to impress people in the first seconds or minutes\u2026 \u00a0but there’s an even bigger lesson from Hot Wheels<\/em>. You have to create a driving system and put it under test. Hot Wheels<\/em> is smooth, but obviously it was not born this way.\u201d There\u2019s no one source of truth in an arcade racing game, because it\u2019s not simulating reality. So the developer has to create their own reality.<\/p>\n

All of which is very philosophical, but that speaks to the kind of thought and care that Caletti\u2019s team have poured into Screamer<\/em>. Whether it creates the kind of reality players want to inhabit long-term remains to be seen, but what\u2019s immediately clear is that this game won\u2019t go down as just another arcade racer. In an era when we fear the AI-sloppification of every creative expression, it\u2019s just what we need: something idiosyncratic, bold, autered, and a bit weird.<\/p>\n

Screamer is out on 26 March for PC, Xbox Series X\/S, and PlayStation 5.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re probably more accustomed to exacting two-wheeled racing sims from Italian studio Milestone than anime-infused, futuristic arcade car races. It\u2019s been at the helm of the\u00a0MotoGP series since 2013, but its earliest release as Graffiti Games in 1995 was a rip-roaring racer named, er,\u00a0Screamer. This 2026 spiritual sequel does share some DNA with that debut. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-1841009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1841009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1841009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1841009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1841009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}