On the ride into work this morning, I drove over several pedestrians, flipped my car twice after hitting guardrails at the wrong angle, and took 5 minutes to get unstuck when I drove through the plate-glass window of a coffee shop. I'd say I've learned everything I need to know about driving from video games.

While the participant's driving skills were impeded, their ability to hit prostitutes with bats remained sharp even in third person.

No but you still need to jump over a pit or throw back something else if a Red Shell is after you.

I find that the Simpsons Road Rage point system for pedestrians is very accurate.

It's what I base my vehicular homicide priorities on.

i played a fair bit of PGR4 on the xbox, this game also have motorbikes as adversaries, but if you drive a car you can easily bash them into the guard rail, setting them back an easy 10 seconds.

Then one day i sat at the lights, and a motorbike stopped next to my, and "if i bash him as soon as the lights go green, at least i wont have to worry about him" flashed through my head....

I used to play a lot of Rad Racer as a kid. While taking my first driving lesson the driving instructor chided me for turning the wheel left and back to center then right and back to center in order to keep the car going the way I wanted it to. She immediately grabbed the wheel and strongly suggested the car would go the way I pointed it, at which point I realized a wheel doesn't behave the way an NES d-pad does.

True story.

I tried parachuting out of a moving car after playing Just Cause 2.

Didn't work so well...

When I was younger one of my favourite games to play was Road Rash. [wikipedia.org] and it saved MY Life back in 2005. I was riding along one evening when I was suddenly found riding along another motorcyclist. My natural instinct was to whip out my 5 foot chain, beat him with it senselessly until he wiped out into a traffic sign, and continue along at breakneck speeds, only to stop for some hookers and booze.

The real question should be "Is there any chance Jack Thompson is going to read this post?". There's no way to answer that, but for now I'll stick with the "By God I sure hope not" attitude.

You accidentally that sentence.

The best defense is a good offense.

I had GTA Vice City for PS2, and an icestorm hit. My car was frozen in place, and I had a long weekend. So I just let it melt. Meanwhile with nothing better to do or no place to go, it was 3 days of GTA. I played in the virtual rain a lot and learned a lot about sliding around. I think it was one of the driving course things where you have to make it cross-island and back under a time limit, and I kept having to re-try.

Thaw came, I got in my car to go to Burger King. Pulled out the driveway, blew through 2 stop signs right in a row (within 20 feet of each other) and got pulled over in less than 50 feet since it was right in front of a cop car.

I only escaped a massive ticket because some fire or shooting required his presence more than little old clearly sober me. "You didn't even try to slow down, for either one of those," he said as he hopped back in his car.

Now every time it snows, I get in my 6-speed and drive around for fun, the more sliding the better. Cool story bro, there I saved you the time.