To demonstrate how far real arcade race fans will go to test their mettle against the similarly inclined, Motorhead multiplayer has inspired user web sites in the UK (where you still pay for each minute of phone time, mind you) to facilitate hook ups. The planned upgrade to twelve players should run over a few toes in the game industry.
Here are a few pointers, just in case you are a feature hog.
The retail version has 30,000+ polygons per track. No, I did not count each one, I am taking the marketing material at face value here. With 16 bit rendering and graphics, high precision texture mapping, 16-bit 3D sound and full support for D3D and Glide, the tradeoff here is between speed and imagery and seems to have been well thought out. The cars don't even have proper textures but they look pretty damn nice anyway.
Moving and movable objects (those aforementioned road dividers being an example of said movable objects) that don't just disappear when you turn your back. You can drive around the course and they'll still be right where you left them (my next foray will be to collect all the road signs I can find and put them into the middle of the road just before the finish line, causing a major pile up when the posse rides through. I don't know yet if the game will let me do it but I'm going to try.) In fact, if you don't finish your laps and just let the other cars pass you by, they eventually run out of gas and stall wherever they are, leaving more movable objects to play with.
Visual effects being put to good use include fog, sparks, smoke, skidmarks, halos and oh yes, flying grass bits. Funny but the grass bits usually don't make it onto the PR features list.
With nine techno pumping soundtracks, all of which work great for driving as well, music is not a problem. And with 100+ soundeffects, including a massively impressive array of horns, you can meepmeep your way to the finish line with style.
Added to the just messing about fun mentioned above are the recording feature, time-attack, single race, ghost race (where you can play with yourself), league race and the ultimate fun: eight-person multi-player game via IPX, TCP/IP or modem.
Added since retail and available in patches are the improved multplayer protocol using Winsock and twelve-person multiplayer over the internet. support for dedicated server, added possibilty to drive all tracks backwards giving eight "new" tracks (driving backwards is really quite fun using the F2 external view and the ctrl key look back feature but maybe they didn't mean it quite this way)
Newly added features in the Diamond bundle version are trilinear filtering, true color rendering, triple buffering, 24 bits texture format and Forcefeedback support.
Under development is Aureal 3D 1.0 support and anisotropic filtering.