No helmet cans, please. Thank you.
"helmet-cam turns to follow the driving line." GEBUZ ALMIGHTY NO. Please no, have mercy.
At the infancy of racing games, Microsoft tried to do a racing game (googling result is Microsoft CART Precision Racing), that had that same "feature". It made the driving so dizzy, and hard to focus, that it gave me headaches.
The cam would turn so badly that it wouldn't show the "windshield" anymore. Ops. Is that the gearbox of the car in front of you, or are you front spoilers happy to meet my helmet?
Lo and behold, somebody tried to pull that off 20 YEARS LATER. Even in the tiny screenshot provided here, thank you, but no thank you.
Intelligent AI? HOW ABOUT RUBBER-BAND AI? In the Most Wanted series, even if you could outrun, out-turn, and outwit the crap of the AI, there they were whizzing by you on the next corner after you nicked an oncoming car, when you had clearly opened some, say, 200 meters ahead of them.
That was most glaring when (ahem, in the purpose of research) you cheated the hell out of the game with trainers. You could enable infinite boost, infinite slow motion, and there were the AI cars one corner behind you, even when they clearly couldn't have infinite boost as well. Or could they?
So I found out that you should upgrade only suspension, tires and brakes; everything that help you corner. Provided you don't hit anything, you are bound to win every race. However, you can't do that for very long, because the cops need to be rammed, and you can only do that with plenty horsepower.
Not even cheating helped the game, so I dumped it in a drawer. Yes, MW is fun at first, but then the AI starts to annoy you with its infallibility. To prove my point I ran all the timed courses, and the AI just broke her own record of the track just to keep up with me while I was not cheating, and did it again when I cheated heavily. Consistency FAIL.
Of all the games mentioned here, I liked NFSU2 with its full Arcade approach to handling that responds very well to gamepads, and the classic Gran Turismo 2 in the original PSX that was pretty unforgivable, but it was fair regarding the AI behaviour and theoretical lap record for each course, and you had to actually learn cornering, braking, and following the line in any course.