Racing publisher Codemasters has picked up Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios in a £23 million/$30 million deal that will see the entire 150-person studio join the company.

Codemasters has been developing and publishing games for more than 30 years and continues to churn out racers, from the annual F1 series to the off-road Dirt Rally 2.0. Slightly Mad Studios, meanwhile, released its first game, Need for Speed: Shift in 2009, eventually starting its own racing series, Project Cars, in 2015.

Its last game, Project Cars 2, is the "apex of apex-hitting sims," according to Phil Iwaniuk's Project Cars 2 review, "but leaves casuals behind." Though it might take racing so seriously that it puts off novice racers, Phil still found it a very convincing sim and gave it an 89. 

The deal includes Project Cars and an "unannounced Hollywood blockbuster," according to the announcement. Slightly Mad Studios was already working on the third Project Cars game and is also developing a mobile spin-off, Project Cars Go. 

The biggest racing publisher acquiring one of the best racing developers around sounds like pretty good news, especially if it means more Project Cars. The Hollywood blockbuster is likely Fast & Furious, which CEO Ian Bell teased in a livestream with SpotTheOzzie. 

Similar its last partnering with Humble Bundle, Bandai Namco's latest collection of discounted games spans a number of genres—including racing, third-person shooters, platformers, and JRPGs. Live now, the Humble Bandai Namco Bundle 2 runs for the next 13 days. 

In Humble's familiar tiered reward style, this bundle's first 'pay what you want' level (which requires you pay $1+ to obtain a Steam key) includes Pac-Man 256, Ace Combat Assault Horizon, and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West's Premium Edition. 

Jump to the 'beat the average' section—which, at the time of writing, stands at $8.52 (approximately £6.82)—and you'll also get third-person shoot 'em up Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade, drive 'em up Project Cars, and fight 'em up Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst. 

Part with $15 (about £12.01) and you'll receive all of the above, as well as JRPG Tales of Zestiria and Project Cars' On Demand DLC which includes an impressive 12 slices of downloadable extras. If you're feeling extra flush, coughing up $35 (around £28.08) will also bag you a pre-order code for Tarsier Studios' incoming and lovely-looking platformer Little Nightmares (due April 28). 

As always, it's up to you how you split your money between the publisher, the organisers and charity—Extra Life and Save the Children being the designated organisations this time round. In the event you're tempted to vouch for the top tier but aren't too familiar with Little Nightmares, here's a look at its latest trailer: 

The Humble Bandai Namco Bundle 2 is live now through February 14.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.  

We haven't heard much about Project Cars 2 since its crowdfunding campaign kicked off in the summer of 2015. But it may not be too terribly far away, as Slightly Mad Studios CEO Ian Bell said in a recent forum post that it could be released as soon as September. 

"It's still a very tight run as we're a bit behind on GUI and Career so nothing is set in stone yet. Current guess is Septemberish," he wrote. In a follow-up post, he said he gave the September target "because the leaks are getting worse and a lot of misinformation was building." He also denied that "Septemberish" indicates a delay, since a release date hadn't been announced in the first place. 

Bell also indicated that we'll be hearing more about Project Cars 2 soon. "We have a very carefully planned marketing and information release program and anything that wasn't already out there by me (like our late 17 release 'aim' which I'm on record here stating from over a year back) has to stay under wraps," he wrote. "[It will begin in] weeks not months. So as per our tweets, very soon now. The ancient screenies are killing me BTW. It looks so much better now with more to come until beta." 

In December, Bell said that QA testing on Project Cars 2 had already begun, and that Slightly Mad planned a minimum of seven months of testing. He also promised that "none of the famous brands are missing this time." That could even include Porsche, whose exclusive licensing agreement with Electronic Arts expired late last year.

Once you've forked out for a top-of-the-line VR headset, the thought of spending more money on actual software can be wince-inducing. So it's lucky there's plenty of smaller (and free) VR stuff to try, and Project Cars: Pagani Edition has, as of this weekend, joined that list.

As the name implies, Pagani Edition is all about Pagani cars, and seems to be a vehicle for promoting that brand (it's the "result of a unique collaboration with legendary Italian car-maker Pagani Automobili".) You get five Pagani cars and three tracks on which to drive them, in Time Trial or "Quick Race Weekend" modes. Importantly, you don't need a VR headset to play, though it supports both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

You can head over here to download it. Our Matt White quite enjoyed the base game when it released last year, describing the "uncompromising simulation" as "beautiful, bold and varied".

"Racing" is less a genre than it is a feeling. The ultra-realism of a game like iRacing and the cartoonish chaos of Burnout: Paradise have nothing in common except this: when you're racing to the final corner, wheel-to-wheel with your last rival, you are utterly lost in that moment. That moment is why we play racing games. It's the high that racing fans are always chasing. The great racing games take you there again and again.

Our criteria:

This list tries to strike a balance between high-fidelity racing sims, "sim-lite" racing games that balance realism with approachability, and action-oriented arcade racers. It's biased towards games that offer a lot of variety of experience in one package, as well as toward more recent games that will work with a minimum of fuss.

Developer: Playground Games, Turn 10Released: September 2016

In our review of Forza Horizon 3, Phil thinks calling it a racing game is reductive. "It's a huge, varied playground full of things to do in cars." And he's right. You're rewarded equally for completing a race through the tight corners of urban Australia and driving a max speed through a farmer's property. It has enough switches to turn on or off that can make it play like chewy arcade racer or like a realistic sim. You can outfit any of over 300 photorealistic cars with any dumb livery you like, or you can fine tune the suspension. The DJs will play special songs that give you bonus points for driving like a smooth operator or a damn maniac. The list goes on and on, but best of all, you can do everything with friends in a fairly seamless cooperative mode.

Our recommendation is caveated with a warning that Forza is not an easy game to run, and some performance issues are still getting ironed out, but none of them are enough to pull us out of its gorgeous, playful open world.

Developer: CodemastersReleased: August 2016

In our review of F1 2016, Sam White called it "the most well-featured, authentic recreation of Formula One ever created, and it s a genuinely good PC port."

There's a massive checklist of new features that make F1 2016 the most immersive it's ever been. With manual starts, every race begins as a tense technical exercise. And a new R&D system doles out points that let you develop a specific car over the course of a season.

But most importantly, small refinements to the racing round out the sim, including "the slide of the car as you over-accelerate out of a turn; the gentle squeeze of the brakes so you don t slide into a smoke-billowing, tire-ruining lock-up; the aquaplaning as you stray away from the safety of the racing line in a monsoon downpour every lap is a joyous exercise in taming a ludicrously overpowered beast. "

Developer: NadeoReleased: August 2011

Trackmania 2 is split into three different games, Stadium, Valley, and Canyon. You don't need the complete collection to enjoy TrackMania's gleefully uninhibited F-Zero meets Sonic the Hedgehog racing action. With endless levels thanks to the powerful level editor, and tracks more improbable than Escher architecture, TrackMania 2 is the most classically PC of the arcade racers.

Developer: Image Space IncorporatedReleased: January 2012

rFactor is still rough around the edges, but it's the heir to one one of the PC's great racing games and one of the most impressive modding communities in the world. rFactor 2, like its predecessor, just keeps growing after launch as new car and track packs come out across all kinds of different series. It's not a cheap habit, but it will please serious racers.

Developer: Criterion GamesReleased: November 2010

The purest essence of Need for Speed before the series went all open-world, all the time. It delivers exactly what the title promises, in race after race, with no downtime. Enjoy the simple life as you aim a European exotic down a stretch of hauntingly beautiful Pacific coast highway with a train of police cars following in your wake.

Developer: Sector3 StudiosReleased: February 2013

This is the descendant of SimBin's once-mighty racing empire. Think of it as GTR Online: it's the ruthlessly-authentic car sim you remember, but retooled for online free-to-play.

That's also its weakness. Once you get the cars on the track, it's all terrific and familiar. But off-track, RaceRoom is all about selling you bits and pieces of the game. Pick a series you want to race and buying the whole pack: that gets you all the cars and tracks you need to enjoy it.

Developer: CodemastersReleased: June 2014

Codemasters' easiest, most entry-level game. The car handling is very forgiving, but with just enough fight in it to teach you the basics of corner-braking and throttle-control. It's got full-race weekends, strong opponent AI, and tons of variety in its racing formats. It's a great point-of-entry for people curious about sim-style racing, and fun for more hardcore drivers who just want to relax.

Developer: Ghost GamesReleased: November 2013

Rivals is probably the best of EA's open-world racing games right now. With parallel career tracks for playing as both the cops and street racers, and tons of online features that put you neck-and-neck with human opponents, Rivals makes a strong case for combining Burnout: Paradise-style open-world racing with online connectivity. At least until EA turns the servers off…

Developer: Codemasters SouthamReleased: May 2011

Rally racing is a contest between driver and a narrow, twisting ribbon of country road that is doing its best to kill the driver.

Dirt 3 brings it to life in all its stomach-churning glory. It feels faster than any other game on this list, because skidding sideways and 50 MPH through a dirt-and-gravel hairpin, just inches away from a wall of a Finnish birch, proves to be more intense than taking an F1 car through Eau Rouge at Spa.

Developer: iRacing Motorsport SimulationsReleased: August 2008

With its regular online racing leagues and meticulous car and track modeling, iRacing is as close to real racing as you can get on the PC.

That also means iRacing is something you need to work up to. It has no meaningful single-player component and, with its subscription fees and live tournament scheduling, it requires significant investment. But for a certain class of sim racing fan, there is nothing that compares.

Developer: Ubisoft ReflectionsReleased: September 2011

With a retro-chic ‘70s vibe, one of the best soundtracks in games, and a truly original twist on the open world racer, Driver: San Francisco just radiates style and cool in a way that no other game on this list can match.

With the ability to "shift" between NPC cars at-will, Driver:SF is one of the only post-Paradise open-world racers to think of something fresh and new to do with the freedom of the open world.

Developer: Black Rock StudioReleased: May 2010

Welcome to the Michael Bay Motorsports Hour, where fake sports cars will rocket through desolate, orange-filtered urban wastelands at blinding speed while drivers accumulate enough energy to trigger bomb-drops from overhead helicopters, vicious sweeps from out-of-control cranes, and even the odd explosion of an entire city block.

It's the perfect chaser to a lot of open-world arcade racers: Split / Second is laser-focused on absurd automotive chaos and increasingly improbable tableaus of bloodless mechanical carnage.

Developer: Slightly Mad StudiosReleased: March 2011

For a game that is ostensibly all about striking a compromise between realistic sim racing and edge-of-your-seat arcade action, Shift 2 feels totally uncompromised. It channels the violence and barely restrained power of high-end sports cars with the brilliant touch of an ace driver like a Senna or a Niki Lauda. The cars twitch and buck under acceleration, the tires shriek around the corners, your vision is twisted and distorted by the speed and the G-forces… but somehow you're in control.

That's the illusion that Shift 2 crafts. It always feels like you have a tiger by the tail… but somehow you keep the car on the road, and keep clawing your way through the field. The thrill and the terror never quite go away, though, thanks to Slightly Mad's outstanding use of camera effects, sound, and a deceptively twitchy handling model.

Shift 2 strikes a perfect balance. It's the game I go to when I want a ridiculously intense and demanding racing experience… but I don't want to work as hard as a game like iRacing or RaceRoom tries to make me.

Developer: Criterion GamesReleased: January 2008

Burnout Paradise is seven years old. Seven years old! Seven years of being the most imitated racing game in history.

And yet the original model still surpasses its imitators. It's so much purer and more exciting than the games it inspired. It doesn't have any licensed cars, so instead it features car-archetypes that crumple into gut-wrenchingly violent wrecks. Compare those to the fender-benders that wipe you out in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Criterion's attempt at topping themselves and where you get the sense that just depicting a shattered headlight would have entailed hundreds of meetings with Lamborghini's lawyers.

Paradise isn't an online "social" experience. It's not all about collectibles and unlocks. You get new cars, but they're not the point of the game. It's about driving around a city populated entirely by cars, listening to a drivetime DJ spin classic and pop rock tracks while you drive hell-for-leather through twisting city streets, mountain passes, and idyllic farmland. It's violent, blindingly fast, and endlessly entertaining. It's created the modern arcade racing genre, but the joke is on us, because all we've done ever since is try to get back to Paradise.

Developer: Kunos SimulazioniReleased: December 2014

Assetto Corsa might be the finest driving simulator in the world right now. Its handling model is incredibly convincing and challenging, without ever feeling exaggerated for effect. It's also got a satisfying career mode that throws a nice array of challenges at you across a wide variety of disciplines. Each new stage helps you develop the skills needed to drive Assetto Corsa's most demanding cars at the highest levels of racing.

It's also a slightly bare-bones game off-track. Its UI looks more like engineering software than a game, and there isn't much flavor. The track list is a little small for my liking, though the extensive car-list makes up for it.

Still, the minimalism suits Assetto Corsa's mission: it's about driving as cleanly and skillfully as possible on the very outside edge of performance. At a certain point in your racing life, that's all you want to do.

Developer: Slightly Mad StudiosReleased: May 2015

Project CARS is an easy pick by being the "desert island" racing game. If I could only take one of these games with me to a permanent gaming exile, Project CARS would be the one I choose.

It's gorgeous, with some the most vivid weather and lighting conditions I've ever seen in a racing game. It's got all the variety you could want, from classic F1 racers to old 1970s touring cars to modern Le Mans Prototypes. Each car is unique and challenging, placing new demands on your skills and rewarding you in new ways. It's got great tracks, with special love and attention lavished on some of the lesser-known UK racing circuits, and might feature the most exciting version of Laguna Seca's Corkscrew turn in the history of the genre.

Project CARS requires a lot of forgiveness and DIY tweaking. AI drivers are too "on-rails", but patches have made them far less accident-prone. It takes a lot of fiddling to find the exact difficulty and realism settings that are right for you, and the career mode isn't much to write home about. It's not the greatest racing game ever made, but right now it is the most essential racing game around.

Its fiddly customizability ultimately works in its favor as it becomes a game that will grow alongside your skills. Bit by bit, I find myself turning off driver aids, getting more ambitious with my car setups, and bumping-up the AI difficulty. Project CARS has served up a lot of great races but, most importantly, it is always an amazing drive.

With the much-delayed but rather good Project Cars now out the door, Slightly Mad Studios has done the perfectly thinkable by announcing plans for a sequel, Project Cars 2, which it says will expand upon the "huge success" of the original.

"With an existing schedule of On Demand content already underway to continue providing Project Cars with fresh new features, updates, and great things to play with throughout the year, Slightly Mad Studios now turns its attention to the future with the announcement of the continuation of the franchise with Project Cars 2," the studio wrote.

Like the original, Project Cars 2 will be "created, tested, and ultimate approved" by backers on the WMD Portal crowdfunding platform. The campaign promises over 200 cars from 40 different classes, 50 unique locations and more than 200 courses, racing styles including rallycross, hillclimbs, and touge, co-op career modes, seamless connectivity, esports features, and more. 

Slightly Mad also promised that the development of the new game won't interfere with its plans for the old one: "Project Cars will continue to see massive updates, features, and content throughout 2015 & beyond," it tweeted. "Project Cars 2 will happen simultaneously."

The Project Cars 2 crowdfunding campaign is live now at wmdportal.com.

Accusations that Slightly Mad Studios intentionally built Project Cars with a version of PhysX it knew wouldn't run properly on AMD video cards recently surfaced in a lengthy post on Reddit. The author claims, in great detail, that all PhysX calculations on PCs with AMD display cards must be offloaded to the CPU, which has a very detrimental impact on performance, and worse, the choice to stick it to AMD was made intentionally and nefariously, because of the studio's pre-existing relationship with Nvidia.

The allegations were widespread and specific enough to cause Slightly Mad to respond with an official denial. "For the past few days, erroneous information posted on Reddit and other websites has spread misinformation with regards to Project Cars' performance on systems using AMD GPUs," it wrote in a statement. 

"To correct the wrongful assumptions regarding Project Cars performance on AMD GPUs, the Madness engine and the degree of involvement from our third-party technical partners, Slightly Mad Studios feel compelled to point out the following facts:

- Project Cars is not a GameWorks product. We have a good working relationship with nVidia, as we do with AMD, but we have our own render technology which covers everything we need. - NVidia are not "sponsors" of the project. The company has not received, and would not expect, financial assistance from third party hardware companies. - The Madness engine runs PhysX at only 50Hz and not at 600Hz as mentioned in several articles - The Madness engine uses PhysX for collision detection and dynamic objects, which is a small part of the overall physics systems - The Madness engine does not use PhysX for the SETA tyre model or for the chassis constraint solver (our two most expensive physics sub-systems) - The Madness engine does not use PhysX for the AI systems or for raycasting, we use a bespoke optimized solution for those - The physics systems run completely independently of the rendering and main game threads and utilizes 2 cores at 600Hz - The physics threading does not interact with the rendering, it is a push system sending updated positional information to the render bridge at 600Hz - Any performance difference with PhysX would not be reflected with differences in comparing rendering frame rates. There is no interaction between PhysX and the rendering - Overall, PhysX uses less than 10% of all physics thread CPU on PC. It is a very small part of the physics system so would not make a visual difference if run on the CPU or GPU - Direct involvement with both nVidia and AMD has been fruitful in assisting with the game performance at various stages of development. Both AMD and nVidia have had access to working builds of the game throughout development, and they have both tested builds and reported their results and offered suggestions for performance improvements. - Testing of the game with different driver versions has produced a variety of performance results on both nVidia and AMD hardware. This is entirely to be expected as driver changes cannot always be tested on every game and every card, and this is the reason why both companies produce game-specific driver profiles, to ensure that they can get the best out of the game. - Project CARS does not use nVidia specific particle technology - the system we use is a modified version of the same technology we used on the Need for Speed: Shift and Shift Unleashed games, and was entirely developed in-house. The reason the performance drops when there are a lot of particles on screen is simply because processing a large number of particles is very expensive."

In a separate thread originally posted on a private Slightly Mad forum and quoted on HardForum, studio boss Ian Bell categorically denied that Nvidia had paid anything toward the development of the game, and indicated that the problem with performance on AMD cards is "mainly a driver issue."

The line between simulation and arcade has blurred substantially throughout the years. I m pretty sure it s because developers have finally got wise to the fact that sterile sim racers are just rarely much fun to play, no matter how realistic the suspension tuning options are. But I think it s also a matter of audience appeal—the threat of having to be liked by everyone. That makes it all the more refreshing that developer Slightly Mad studios has found a way to make simulation exciting again, but without cramming with fluff or compromising on its vision.

It s the most polished racer I ve played in a while, for sure. While contemporaries like Codemasters have struggled to deliver a game worthy of the most up to date graphical expectations with its F1 series, Project CARS really shines. The engine that Slightly Mad has built is impressive, from the interior detail on all 60 or so cars to the environmental design on every single one of its many varied circuits across the globe. It s quite a familiar line-up, with legendaries like Le Mans, Spa-Francorchamps and Monte-Carlo, but this is undoubtedly the best that any of these oft-raced tracks have ever looked on my PC. There are also a couple of fictionalised point-to-point courses, one through the gorgeous C te d'Azur and another through the rocky Californian highlands, which looks stunning under the setting sun. All of this content comes bolstered with a day/night system and breath-taking dynamic weather that delivers some of the most realistic looking rain I ve ever seen.

Project CARS has given me a real challenge from get-go. This is an unforgiving, tough racer that requires patience and skill, especially if you re using a gamepad. You can t just sling your car into the apex and hope to drift out the other side unscathed. CARS is about learning each discipline individually—studying it, mastering it.

It s easy to get caught off guard as well, as Slightly Mad takes a unique approach to its career mode by allowing you open access to any of its many disciplines straight away. Events take place across a calendar, and each event is separated into several days with practice sessions, qualifying and the big race itself. Starting slow is advised, and while it s tempting to hop into a McLaren the first time you boot the game up, I guarantee it ll be a case of spin after spin after spin until you get the hang of things.

From entry level karts and beyond into the realms of LMP and Prototype, each discipline has its own set of races and smaller championships you ll progress through to earn contract options at more advanced teams. Project Cars diversifies its racing to a real extreme, and every new car type is wildly different. Karts are sketchy, sporadic beasts that twitch across the track with an unpredictable ferociousness, Touring cars are heftier, more deliberate and the steering sensitivity is much lower, while the McLaren P1 and other hyper cars are almost repellent to the road. Playing with a gamepad often borders on impossible when racing these—I m a firm believer that a racing game should be playable by everyone and not just the purist elite with force-feedback wheels and racing seats, and CARS doesn t entirely deliver on that front. An extensive list of driving assists from braking and steering assistance to traction control, difficulty tweaks and AI options give you the option to tailor your game to an impressive degree, but it doesn t eradicate the problems entirely.

Still, the satisfaction I got from visibly improving on track timetables is unparalleled. My personal forte was the F1000 series—a comparably low-powered open-wheel discipline exclusive to the UAE region of the Middle East. It was where I really begun to notice my own progression curve, from snagging second-to-last on the grid in every practice and qualifying session, to stringing together flash outside-overtakes and podium finishes. That thrill gave me the want to take other racing types and master them in a similar vein—even if some of them might prove futile with a gamepad.

It s crystal clear that Slightly Mad knows what its hardcore audience wants, and I m really happy that it stuck to its guns in order to deliver it. That s pretty rare nowadays, especially when your vision comes at the expense of wider audience appeal. With more content on the way and a hardcore community already set to get involved in its 24-player lobbies, I m really looking forward to seeing how this game evolves over the next few weeks and months.

If you're among the small number of folk who still buy PC games on disc, then we've got bad news for you: Project Cars has been delayed in Australia, and it's all thanks to the rain. That's right: it's not just Sydney trains that come to a grinding halt when there's moisture in the air, but video games too.

Fair enough, though the rain was quite terrible in Sydney last week, as my kitchen ceiling will attest. Project Cars is expected to hit retail on Friday 8, a mere day after its scheduled release date, and local distributor Bandai Namco has provided us this statement:

"Our local production house suffered some damage in last week s storms which resulted in our PC stock and DLC paper-parts having to be reprinted. As such, we are working to having the Project CARS PC stock delivered to stores this Friday 8^th, a day after the console formats release on Thursday."

Slightly Mad Studios is reportedly in the planning phase for Project Cars 2, according to reports last week. In the meantime, here's some recent footage showing off the game's multiplayer modes.

You can tell Project Cars is releasing soon because there have been a lot of trailers lately. This latest one is focused on the game's multiplayer offerings, but it's really just another excuse to look at shiny cars and nice weather effects, all in 60 frames per-second. 

After a number of delays Project Cars is finally releasing on May 8 and will definitely not be delayed. You can even run it in 12K if you want. Welcome to the future.

Oh, and it looks like Project Cars 2 is already in planning, which makes sense: after a protracted development period for Project Cars, Slightly Mad Studios is no doubt keen to wring the most out of the engine they've built.