Racing games are set up in predictable ways for the most part. You progress through whatever the game has for a career mode while unlocking better, faster cars. You also progress from simple tracks to the more complicated circuits. By the end of the game, you are racing on the most torturous tracks the game can throw at you. Those final tracks exist to test your skills and wreck you cars. So let's talk about the top five toughest tracks to ever show up in a video game.

5. Nurburgring from Various

At this point, I think I may have lost all perspective on how difficult Nurburgring is, which is why it is at the bottom of this list. And if you play racing games with regularity, you will run into this famed German course repeatedly -- I may have spent more time on this course than any other at this point in my video game racing career.

The 14-mile Nordschleife layout of the track is the most famous and the most common version found in games. The track combines low speed, tight technical corners with long straights that will enable most cars to reach their top speed or close to it. It is a course that is challenging because of its speed, tight corners, narrow space and shadows from the forest that will cause mistakes in judgment. Another challenge is just staying focused for the whole course, especially after long straights where, after going 180 mph for a while, you just zone out until a corner jumps out at you that you cannot react to in time.

4. King Cobra Test Track from Forza 2

Of all the tracks on this list, this is probably the one I hate the most. Other tracks are frustrating, but they at least have the decency to be interesting in one way or another and are ultimately rewarding. King Cobra Test Track is a different story. Instead of some lovingly crafted course that takes you through an Italian city or a re-creation of one of the hardest tracks in the world, fans of Forza 2 are greeted with a bare-bones test track in the middle of a desert. There is nothing interesting anywhere near the track. There is also nothing interesting about the track. The track seems to be built solely to torture the driver.

It is composed of tight esses and hairpins because, let's be serious, it is just so much fun to take a supercar though turns at 20 mph. Unlike the other tracks on this list, at no point on this track can you really floor it and get some speed. In fact, you will probably never get out of third gear in most cars. The track is indeed tough, but it makes the list because it is technically difficult and adds to the frustration by being dull, slow and generally unpleasant.

3. Citti de Aria from Gran Turismo 4

This track is unbelievable. Citti de Aria is one of my favorite tracks to look at in the Gran Turismo series, yet it is also hands down my least favorite to actually race on. On most parts of the track, it is only wide enough for a car and a half. There is pretty much no place where a clean pass is easy to make. The turns are narrow, flat and most of them are obscured by the buildings that surround the course, which makes for blind entries.

You basically memorize the track and hope for the best. If the difficulty of the track was not enough, the most frustrating of Gran Turismo’s always annoying license tests occur on this track -- the one in which one tap of the wall will ruin your run and cause you to restart over and over. This is a beautifully detailed track to cruise around on, but racing on it results in busted PS2 controllers.

2. Rally di Positano from Forza 3

We return to Italy for another exercise in beauty combined with frustration. Rally di Positano is like GT4’s Citti de Aria but longer, harder and with a wonderful seaside view. The track is not as narrow as its GT4 counterpart, but the extra room is needed since repeated elevation and racing surface changes will surely send your brand new Ferrari or Lamborghini out of control more than a few times.

If you choose not to dutifully memorize the entire eight-mile course, the track's elevation changes result in blind jumps that can send you directly into a wall. Adding to the difficultly are the many sections that are not on smoothly paved asphalt. During these particular sections, you will be attempting to control your selected supercar as you drive over a bumpy brick road that will make your controller vibrate like mad and cause your car to lose most of its grip. And if that was not enough, you still have to worry about multiple blind turns that come about as well.

1. Rainbow Road from Mario Kart

I hate this track with a passion. It does not matter which version of Mario Kart I play, I hate Rainbow Road in all of them. I have raced and won on the Nurburgring in many games, and that is a track that is considered one of the toughest in the world. It is also the track that performance cars from around the world are used on to measure their merit against one another. In the video game world, I have raced through the so-called "Green Hell" in supercars that are considered the pinnacle of console racing simulations. Yet I would gladly race through that section of woods in Germany for all eternity rather than run through another race at Nintendo’s "Rainbow Hell."

Do you know what is worse than an extremely narrow track with walls? An extremely narrow track that has no walls and is in outer space. You screw up in Citti de Arria or Rally di Positano, and you crack up your million-dollar race car. Big deal. You screw up on Rainbow Road and you fall to your (temporary) death. This track would be at the top of this list even if you did not have to deal with the other racers firing turtle shells at you and leaving banana peels all over the place. In fact, I am pretty sure I have managed to put in more sub 10-minute laps at the Nurburgring than I have at Rainbow Road.

These are my five picks for the toughest video game tracks, but what tracks do you guys think are the toughest?