Trackmania in 2022: What to play?

[Dark Sun Gwyndolin]

Title. I've had a faint craving for Trackmania after watching speedruns, so I was curious. What is 'the thing' for Trackmania in 2022? Is the Uplay Trackmania game worth it? Or should I play one of the ones on Steam? Cost isn't a limitation.

[BitUniverse]

TL;DR:
The way I've looked at it is TMUF/NF are the good offline games, Turbo is for experiencing a very unique TM game and getting precision down (there's so many small things in those tracks), I don't have any of the TM2 games, so I can't comment, but from what I've seen they look good as well, and 2020 is for getting into the community aspect of Trackmania, though has a subscription.
If you want to ask some people who know more than me, here's the TMNA Discord link if you want[discord.gg] and there's also Discords for other countries, maybe continents like this one. I know that the USA and Canada server links are floating around in the TMNA server.

============================ Full Word Vomit =============================

====== Trackmania Nation/United Forever
TMForever games have smashing campaigns, but the community is mainly on forums and I don't know many people that would get into that, but there are definitely Discords out there. ManiaExchange has one and the TAS community has one. It is an older game, so people have moved on to recent ones. There's also the issue of it being an old game, and there are times that you have issues that just don't have a fix (whoever decided to leave log files out of the game, I want to meet and have a chat). I had an issue with this computer that fixed itself months later.

====== Trackmania2
TM2 does still have a lot of tourneys, but you need to have the right environment though. I don't have the games so can't comment other than I know tourneys are still going on.

====== Shootmania
To throw this in here, Shootmania is a solid game. The North America TM discord plays it every Friday. Definitely not worth $20 though, it's usually dead. Get it on sale for $5.

====== TM Turbo
Turbo has an amazing campaign, it so unique and I wish Nadeo would do design like it again, but it is a challenging campaign and the online community is non existent. The big reason for this is that it's a console port and as such it's missing a lot that normal PC TrackMania games have, like a comprehensive track editor and end-user servers. It's all on one dedicated server, so you can't have your own rule sets.

====== Trackmania 2020
TM2020 is solid. It really is a modern TMForever game, both in the good and bad Gameplay is good, you have the most recent engine so no ramstine bugs and landing bugs are practically non existent. The campaign is free, like Nations, and like United you need to pay for online but it is a subscription, though cheap in my opinion. It is a confusing piece of crap. There's three tiers. You got your free version, where you get your campaign, simple track editor, and that's about it. The next is standard where you unlock online play for the duration and the Advanced track editor and the skin editor forever, however you don't get access to clubs. It's $10 a year. The highest tier is Club and it gets you everything. It's $30 for one year and $60 for three years. I almost didn't play this game because I had never heard of the series and this was so weird. You can ignore keeping the ToTD and campaign maps. The leader boards are closed after that season. It really doesn't matter unless you want all author medals.

[Dark Sun Gwyndolin]

Gave NuTrackmania a try, I think I'll keep playing it and might even get a 1-year subscription.