F1 2015 is upon us, bearing the weight of three decades of F1 games on its HD shoulders. Who could have thought in the heady days of Namco's Pole Position that one day we'd be looking at 60 photo-quality images made up of over 2 million pixels each zooming around on TVs the size of dinner tables? Recognisable 3D drivers, laser-scanned circuits… it's incredible how far we've come.

But that doesn't mean previous F1 games should be forgotten forever just because the drivers in them have long-since retired (or worse) and their graphics look like Steve from Minecraft got given a racing overalls skin. Now, to be clear - I'm not just going to list all the classic ones like Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, F1 World Grand Prix or F1 '97 because the truth is, while they were amazing at the time, they're not very good if you play them now. These are the other F1 games that still deserve to be played today.

While the impressiveness of those scaling sprites has waned slightly, this F1-themed arcade sprint is still a ton of fun. The camera on the car is slightly off-centre, which immediately gives this a more organic feel than most 2D racers. In the arcade, this was exacerbated by the free-feeling analog steering wheel.

The crashes are over the top, with explosions and bouncing wheels, but there's a really nice pit mechanic. His name's Bob. No, I'm joking (sorry), I mean the way you have to pit in if you sustain damage, as your car smokes, then catches fire. Fail to do so and it explodes, but sometimes you can just make it to the finish line before it does. Risk vs reward – it's classic gaming stuff.

Officially licensed? No. Real tracks? No. Formula One cars rocketing around banked curves, flipping against rocks and scrambling for time bonus checkpoints? Hell yes. This may be best remembered for being the game that kick-started the 3D polygon era, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it is still an absolute blast to play. The handling is precise, the polygonal scenery flashing past still looks gorgeous and the three tracks are beautifully designed.

The arcade original remains the best version (with PS2's remake being a bit too slidey to be perfect), with silky-smooth and gloriously solid flat-shaded 3D. Smoothly switching between the four viewpoints is still more fun than it should be, and the difficulty level is perfectly judged, ensuring plenty of longevity. They don't make 'em like this any more. FOR SHAME.

"You wot, mate? A PSP game? Naff off." That's what you're thinking. But this is, quite simply, the best dedicated handheld F1 game you can buy. It's essentially a shrunk-down PS2 game, complete with engine failures, damage (decent damage, at that) and extensive career mode. Your pit engineer even tells you how your sector times are compared to your opponents. It's the full F1 experience.

The graphical simplification is evident if you play it today, but that's where the compromise ends. The controls are wonderful. Cannoning along the flat-out chicane at Albert Park, picking your braking point for the right hander feels every bit as good as a full console game. The Vita version of F1 2011 is nowhere near as good as this. FOR SHAME.

Domark's 16-bit racer remains one of the fastest video games ever made, particularly in 'Turbo Mode', which uses the graphics from the two-player mode in a single-player set-up. The scenery absolutely flies by at these speeds, with a little 'whoosh' noise every time you pass under a flyover.

It's got the official drivers of 1993 too, barring Ayrton Senna who must have still been under license with Sega at the time. While the technical accomplishment of having 3D grandstands and rotated sprites (without a Mega-CD to do all the work) has faded with time, revving the cat-like engine and gliding through these sparse environments is still fun – especially when you clip the wheel of a slow-moving car and bunny-hop into an Agip sign.

To think I found this in a bargain bin. Using a bespoke game engine, Melbourne House managed to get the PS2 to shift 22 gorgeous-looking cars around at 60fps. Sure, the damage modelling is underwhelming and the handling is a little too simplified, but the atmosphere of the game and superb sense of fluidity is wonderful.

Best feature? Zooming down a straight in the slipstream of the car in front, watching vortices of air streaming off its back wing. If ever a game was ahead of its time, it's this. If you want to see a PS2 running a game that still stands up next to F1 on PS4, then this is the one.

This one's pretty much vanished into obscurity already, but that's a real shame as it's arguably the best kart racer that isn't called Mario Kart. The drivers and cars may be recognisable (though 'super-deformed' with big heads and cartoon-slanted wheels), but the tracks are only loosely based on reality, with some recognisable corners that then skew upwards into the sky, with rollercoaster sections of excitement.

It's beautifully smooth and controllable (albeit lacking any kind of drift feature as F1 cars really shouldn't drift around corners), and only really let down by some disappointingly generic weapons. Yes, it has weapons. Trapping Jenson Button in bubblegum is an odd thing to do. But still, fun. You'll undoubtedly find it cheap – pick it up, you'll enjoy it.

Everyone remembers PlayStation's officially-licensed Formula One games, but Saturn had one too. It wasn't made by Bizarre Creations, instead appearing under the Sega Sports label. It also didn't have all the tracks, providing just three official circuits (Germany, Suzuka and Monaco) and a handful of playable drivers.

But this is a wonderful arcade representation of Formula One. One of the first console racers to feature a 3D skybox, simply turning the car fills your senses with an amazing visual effect as the sky arcs overhead. Cars spin, tyres go off and you can gamble on fuel between pit stops. It's starting to show its age, but get past the slight flakiness and there's a great racing game here, especially with the official Saturn steering wheel.

Now listen. I want you to know I am being absolutely serious and I'm wearing my 'nostalgia sucks' hat when I say this: Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix was made in 1988, but remains one of the best F1 sims of all time. You have to qualify within a certain time or you'll never see a real race. You've got to keep the revs within the power band to keep fuel consumption down and – explaining instantly why I've always played racers on manual gears – you have to learn to change gear or you won't ever leave the pit lane.

You have four settings for your turbo and have to manage fuel and engine temperature as you use it. If you do run out of fuel, weaving left and right will slosh fuel back into the pump in the engine - just like real cars of the '80s. You can catch spins, blow the engine or your tyres… it's an amazingly faithful replication of the sport – it just looks like your TV's broken, is all. Amazing job, Martech.

How can a 10-years-old PS2 game still be one of the best F1 racers you can buy? Well, it's all in the handling. F1 '05's handling model is sensational. It also uses an increasingly shaky TV pod cam as you get faster, until 200mph really feels like 200mph. If you ever wanted to get your teeth into a fast, responsive, devilishly fun and controllable racing game, then this is absolutely it.

It also sounds incredible. The commentator suggests that you 'turn up the volume' while you wait for the green light, and you really should. There's also a 5-year career mode to get your teeth into. It's little surprise to note this game was developed by Studio Liverpool, of Wipeout fame. Now there was a team that knew how to make a great racer.

Despite the progress made by the sequel (and its now sadness-tinged Ayrton Senna license), it's the original that I would recommend most strongly, and the 16-bit version at that. The gameplay itself may be sedate by today's standards, but the rivalry system is perfect, allowing you to move up through the teams as quickly as you think your skills will allow – or down if you fail to meet expectations.

The music is wonderful, and couples with a presentation style tinged with the romance of late 1980s-era F1. The 2D images disguised to look like TV footage in the post-race screens are achingly beautiful, complete with heat haze effects. It’s a game to savour, and also one of the best games you can play on a Sega Nomad. Fact.

Studio Liverpool's first - and last - PS3 F1 game is still beautiful. Running at 60 frames per second, it's only the 720p resolution that really betrays its last-gen status. But it's arguably volved than Codemasters' subsequent take on the sport, thanks to QTE pitstops (way better than that sounds), parade laps to warm up your tyres, and commentary over the race action.

The handling model is more accessibly video gamey than true simulation, and you can even steer with the D-pad which is actually surprisingly sharp. Any game with Martin Brundle in it is automatically 20% better, so it gets marks for that too. Smooth, precise, exhaustive and with damage that actually sees a wheel falling off when you hit another car (I know, right?), this is still mightily impressive, 8 years on.

This may not have been the final last-gen F1 game from Codemasters, but it's by far the best. Firstly, you've got the result of four years of honing the formula (pun intended) and the amazing Ego engine, making this easily good enough to pass for a new-gen racing game. But if the main course (pun not intended) is good, it's the dessert that'll keep you coming back for more.

There's classic content featuring vintage cars, circuits and even drivers. The 1988 season is best represented (although sadly lacking the stars of that year – the McLaren Hondas), but there's 1990s content too, offered as DLC or with the special edition of the game. And that's got Nigel Mansell's FW14B. I made a video series showcasing the best of this content, which you should totally watch. With such an authentic and slick main game made even better with such fan-pleasing content, it's clearly the best F1 game ever made. Unless F1 2015 can change that...

It's finally happened: Bethesda has gone toe to toe with Minecraft. The publisher has been toying with in-game map editing tools for its core RPG franchises for some time – Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion allows you to build and decorate houses, on top of a robust physics system that lets you drag objects around willy-nilly – but not ‘til has it handed us more or less a level designer’s power over an area's layout and contents.

In certain parts of the new game, you'll be able to convert objects into component resources such as wood and rubber, then buy and place walls, props and interactive fixtures to form your very own town. What's more, NPCs will come to live in these towns and you'll need to keep them fed, watered, happy, and protected, placing resources such as crops and automated defences to head off raider attacks. OK, so you can't (that we know of) dig into the very terrain, but everything above ground is yours to meddle with.

There are a fair few games with map-editing features on the shop right now, of course, and certain design “trends” have emerged, from the obligatory giant penis effigy to those terrifyingly adept works of urban planning I keep bumping into on Youtube. Here are a few varieties of user-created settlement you're all but guaranteed to encounter at least once in the average Fallout 4 savegame.

Fallout 4's editing toolset includes switches (terminals) that can be hooked up to components such as power generators and signboards to control their behaviour. From the E3 videos, it appears that you can bodge together quite complex sequences of interactions, calling on more advanced gadgets such as laser tripwires and components that all map to the same terminal. My knowledge of programming is admittedly sketchy, but it sounds like you could even create your own analytical engine inside the simulation, following in the footsteps of this from Dwarf Fortress.

Quite why people keep feeling the urge to build computers inside other computers eludes me. True, it's cheaper than buying another laptop, but it's also months of work for a machine that's just about powerful enough to add and subtract. One of these days somebody will build a computer inside a computer inside a computer, and humanity will evaporate in a blaze of meta-textuality.

Or Winterhold. Or Whiterun. Or the Starship Enterprise. Or the DisneyLand castle. Or Lordran. Or the set of Carry On Cleo. Probably all of them, in fact, plus the Los Angeles convention centre (complete with NPCs queueing by flickering TV sets), six thousand casino-style billboard animations of Mario doing non-canonical things to Princess Peach, and the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Lengthy trawls of various Reddit boards have taught me that there is nothing committed level editors enjoy more than transplanting pop culture landmarks between or into games, blurring their DNA in a manner calculated to rouse Twitter's shock and admiration. And annoy the hell out of various copyright lawyers.

Fallout 4's aesthetic poses a bit of an obstacle – it's hard to believe you're living in the Smurf Village when there are 200-year-old shopping trolleys all over, and everything looks like it's made of rat droppings – but I have faith in you, fans of license splicing. On PC, of course, you can look forward to skin and texture mods to help complete the illusion. These will migrate to the Xbox One version, with mod support on PS4 still TBC at the time of writing.

For every 10 half-finished eyesores or giant penis sculptures, there should (we hope) be at least one player who sets out boldly to create something that actually works as a town should. A town in which the arrangement of farms, markets, homesteads and so forth is genuinely reminiscent of the practical and emotional needs of living creatures. A town where morale is always high, where nobody wants for potable water, a bar to lean on or a place to lay their head. A town that can hold off raiders and sustain itself without the player needing to pop back continually to fix up the barricades and ensure all the guards are pointing in the right direction.

A town, moreover, that feels like a plausible part of the game's storyline. Bethesda's tools allow for fine-grained object placement – you might spend half-an-hour moving a single lightbulb around in order to precisely illuminate an arresting tableau. It'll be intriguing to see whether the most ambitious town creators can hint at forgotten backstories as successfully as the game's own designers.

Some will see AI raids on player-owned towns as a nuisance, but look at it this way: you're almost certainly going to kill a lot of people in Fallout 4 regardless. At least in this case they have the courtesy to come to you. And think of the loot! The bottle caps! The unending shrieks of pain and terror from without the walls as you recline on your throne at the centre of a maze of tripwires, turrets, landmines and guard towers – a capricious and uncaring despot, growing fat off the suicidal imbecility of scavenger tribes.

The idea of auto-farming enemies in open world games for XP or items has a long, illustrious history – in particular, Minecraft players have learned to bump off whole armies of mobs by placing spawn points near natural hazards. With any luck, Fallout 4's crafting system will be sophisticated enough to allow creation of . Imagine opening a bridge trapdoor below a raiding party to plunge them into a river of nuclear sewage, which then sweeps dropped items beneath a walkway where they can be safely harvested. Every frontier town should have one! Who knows, perhaps you'll find the corpse of the game's final boss in there.

Bethesda-brand NPCs are characterised by two things. One, facial animations that put you in mind of The Exorcist. And two, an endearing mixture of independent thinking and rampant bloody stupidity. Yes, the average Skyrim resident might sleep in an actual bed at night, sell armour by day and hunt the game's wildlife for sport, but you can also to stop him noticing when you nick his stuff. It's not exactly Deus Ex Machina.

For many, these AI foibles are all part of the fun – hey, what's not to love about tavern-goers who ? - but now imagine a Fallout 4 NPC attempting to navigate a town laid out not by a trained designer but some half-arsed teenager. A smashed labyrinth of doorless rooms and free-standing walls through which crusty residents trundle forever, searching in despair for the crops they're supposed to water, stalls they're supposed to run. Truly pitiful.

Let's say you've just gotten hold of a Fat Man, the returning heavy launcher from Fallout 3. You're itching to try it out on something, but the Fat Man is not a weapon you can fire off just anywhere. Put it this way - it's not the kind of weapon that wounds. Were you playing as an utter villain, kicking the legs out from under civilisation as it struggles to its feet, this wouldn't be a problem. But you've resolved to play as a goddamn do-gooder. You're also a stealth specialist. How on Earth are you going to dig yourself a nice cathartic crater without losing karma and making a mockery of your ninja pretensions?

Ah but wait. There is that rubbish, mostly deserted village you set up the other week, isn't there? The one you filled with custom shop window mannequins, who you gave individual names and backstories, so as to create a cathartic mini-realm of guilt-free violent oppression. So that you could do all kinds of evil stuff to people, without losing your hero rating. Because you’re possibly a bit mad. Perhaps you should pay a visit. The kind of visit that ends about, oh, let's say a hundred metres outside the city limits. It's just a shame Fallout 4 doesn't appear to support the same level of realistic building destruction you'd get in, say, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Still, those mannequin minions will fly.

You can build towns on several sites in Fallout 4. Assuming an only-human level of dedication, at least one of the towns you build is probably going to consist of the bare necessities – a shack with a workbench, a roof turret, a strongbox, and a lonely-looking trader peering at the horizon.

It raises an important question: exactly how punishing are the raiding and town morale aspects? Will players be obliged to think big, fleshing out their settlements to satisfy NPC requirements and head off attacks, or will we be able to throw together the odd homestead purely for the sake of a fast-travel point? If the town-building is too much of a chore, its appeal may be limited - much like maintaining a social life in Grand Theft Auto 4.