Winter's coming! Tune up your Playstation

Or your XBox. Yes, the days may get shorter and colder, but it's always warm and dry in front of your TV.
Today's racing simulations are reaching new levels of realism driven by faster hardware and smarter software, and nowhere is this more evident than in the world of console games. In fact, Fernando Alonso and other F1 drivers "trained" on their Playstations for their first race on Turkey's new track.

The launch of the next generation of gaming consoles - Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's XBox 360 - prompted Tom's Hardware Guide to review the current state of the art in console racing sims, and to make some informed predictions about their future evolution. Besides the usual suspects (GT4 and Forza), Tom's covers a few lesser-known games if you feel like trying something new.

Of course there's a parallel universe of racing sims for the PC platform, but we'll save that for a future post.