[Teflon]

DiRT 2 only gives you X uses of the rewind button (based on difficulty level) which I think is a fairly intelligent way of handling things. Possibly GRiD does the same, I haven't played that.

It's a good thing it has a rewind button too because god damn this game does not fuck around when it comes to lining the outsides of corners with boulders, car-launching gradients and telephone poles.

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Oh my god I used to cut classes and go to the library to leaf through old Cars of THE FUTURE coffee-table type books full of glossy pictures of hilariously outdated concept cars . I've got such a crush on that website you linked.

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I played some of that Need for Speed. Maybe it's because I did so right after four rounds of the Forza 3 demo (hard A.I. means HARD A.I.) but it struck me as fairly ridiculous. It starts you off on a shakedown lap and determines how to set the difficulty based on what kind of laptime you set but the physics are so whack I could never tell what the car was up to and it ended up recommending I play on easy with automatic everything (passenger mode). Also it has a Nitro Button.


If it'd come out in the middle of the sim-drought I might've given it more of a shot but man FORZA DEMO. Shift's graphics were apparently a big selling point with the reviewan' crowd but again, FORZA DEMO means it looks two years old already even in the much lauded cockpit view. Which, I'm sorry to say, is still just a Bad Idea because seriously how often does the car's interior take up a significant part of your field of vision while driving in real life? I'd kill eight pedestrians a day if my car had a letterbox for a windshield, never mind trying to judge an apex at 130mph.


EDIT: I don't hate it because I'm bad at it, I hate it because it's supposed to be a racing sim and I am supposed to be not terrible at racing sims. If I'm irredeemably rubbish at your racing sim it's either some next level shit* or some bullshit.

*Like the Forza 1 demo on Laguna Seca where I was all 'yo holmes I know this track from Gran Turismo check it' and proceeded to lock the brakes and slide off into the gravel trap on the first corner.

[Teflon]

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I obtained a copy of Forza 3 too. I can't put a coherent report together right now but here are some random thoughts in a semi-chronological order:

First thing you'll notice: Very British Voiceover. Classy. Second thing you notice: this game's UI will cause you to go snowblind.

That introduction race is the very same as the one in the demo so if you've been playing that you'll be able to win easily. I'm all that into the Audi R8 but the handling is amazing.

Then it's time to pick a first car (for free!). Your choices here are a rung down from what you normally start out with in a racing game, featuring such amazingly sexy racing monsters as a 5-door Yaris or Citroen C4 and not one but TWO tiny monospace people carrier type deals. Echoes of Gran Turismo's Mazda Demio obsession. I picked a Ford Fiesta based solely on it at least looking pretty lightweight. It doesn't display any stats at all here.

Now you go racing for real. You pick from 3 available events (which change depending on what car you're in) and then the game pencils them into a calender and it automatically enters you into a world championship (you start on class E and go up a class each season) as well on sundays. You can only do one event at a time even if you've got like, wednesday, friday and saturday left open. The 3 events thing feels kind of needlessly linear to be honest. Maybe it opens up later on?

Actually driving your gutless little grocery-getter around the track is tons of fun. You can just chuck it into corners and dart back out, tiny tires screaming.

Winning nets you XP, both for the car you're driving and you personally. When the car levels up it gets famous and parts manufacturers start giving you discounts on parts, while leveling up yourself gets you a free car. Only the world championships seem to give out prize cars (conveniently from the next class up so you're ready for next season even if you spent all your cash on tricking out a Scion xD) so leveling is the only way to get free cars otherwise. Cars I've received so far range from pretty cool (Fiat 500 Abarth SS, Vauxhall VX220) to spectacularly useless (Alfa Brera).

Money is easy enough to come by so far, and I've been pretty much dicking around building a car from scratch for each event. Showing up to a Class B (which is like Lotus Elise territory) event in a 1994 Mazda Miata with the RX-8's Renesis rotary engine swapped in and winning is hugely satisfying. Totally resisting the urge to fire the game up and drive that car some more right now.

Budget-minded racers can go on the Auction House (Action Hose) and snipe auctions/snatch cars from people who apparently don't know what the Buyout price does and set it to 3,000 for a Honda NSX-R GT (thanks xXSn1PaK1lLA92Xx). It's already full of stuff like Subaru USA Rally Team-liveried Imprezas and oldschool BMW M3s. Also note that the 'stock' stock car thing isn't just NASCAR (god those things are UGLY without the decals) but DTM cars as well (hell yes CLK DTM).

Tracks I've seen so far have been universally cool with the exception of the non-crazy concrete plate part of Sebring.


This is a pretty good racing game if you ask me.

Edit: oh I need to bitch about something. There's things like a Six Cylinder event but no readily apparent way to discern how many cylinders any given car might actually have. As a car fetishist I know what to pick (VW Rabbit GTI with an R36 engine swap) but why not just have a detailed stats screen somewhere? All it shows is power, torque weight, weight distribution and a skidpad grip rating.

[Teflon]

[Teflon]

Man I did not even know there was proper vintage Abarth to be had and spruced up a Datsun 510 for my blocky little saloon fix. It tipped over on me on the Ladera test track and I got a pretty great shot of it on its side with a bunch of newer cars roaring past.


Then I put a Nascar engine into a 2010 Camaro. I thought it'd be good for oval events. Turns out that YES, you can have too much power for your own good, even on a circuit with no left turns. It's terrifying to drive and you're constantly leaning on the brakes to cope with even the gentlest of bends. It also produces such excessive wheelspin it's useless at drag racing even though it has like 800hp. Benchmark says it does 0-60 in 5.4 seconds which has to be some kind of inefficiency record. Time for some gigantic rear tires.

[Teflon]

This is how I roll



That red dot on the horizon is a Hyundai coupe, one of those cars which massages the game's PI Rating to be almost unbeatable in its class on certain tracks. Another good example is the Caddy CTS-V which ranks pretty low (C I think) because it weighs 2 tonnes but also has 460 horsepower or some shit. You'd better pray you're racing it somewhere with a tight corner right after the starting line or you'll just never see it again.


I kind of have my NASCA(R)maro under control after welding in so much reinforcements it could technically be considered a tube chassis. In class A the C5 Z06 'Vette is the only thing that can even get close, and that's only because it relies on dishonorable tricks like handling and aerodynamics. I have to admit I built it as a what-the-hell ironymobile but it's grown on me. It's just so playful and wild, like a puppy! A 825hp puppy!

Other idiotic projects: 250hp MkI Golf GTI (for <250hp drag-racing), a built-up class D Dino 246gt (w/ neat Ferrari racing stripe as seen on Outrun2006's OR models and the real 360 Stradale) and a Kawasaki-green Lotus Exige built up for POWERRR.

[Teflon]

Oh jesus I'd start pissing in bottles if I had access to that.


I spent way too much time (re)learning paint mode. I know this looks like I just slapped on an orange stripe and called it a day but it actually incorporates a couple of neat tricks, mainly to work around the way a car shaped like this gets chopped up into bits by the editor. Like, those are actually two separate Alpinestars decals because that shoulder-ish area all along the doors and back of the car is part of the Top/Hood mask.



Then I forgot to save and lost the whole thing except for this photo.


Storefront is filling up with some pretty cool stuff by the way, check it out if you haven't already. There's Sega decals, HORNETS and top 10 tuning setups to be had.

I'm currently getting my AWD on. I won an Audi R8 (5.2) and the thing is insane. So much grip and power. It weighs as much as a battleship but you can't even tell. I think it's on top of the A-class leaderboards for both the Nordschleife and Positano, to give you an idea of the thing's range.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Mitsubishi Eclipse/Eagle Talon '95 kills E and D class. It's the first car I've gotten a handle on Ladera with.

[Teflon]

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I wonder if they spent thousands of man hours programming faithful KERS simulation, fuel strategy AI and refueling animations into F1 2010. The FIA kept the actual TEAMS in limbo regarding the final 2010 rules, it must've been rough trying to make a game about it.

Also I enjoyed the loudness of DiRT 2 and thought its americana was a really clever way to have some legit rally cars and drivers without needing a WRC license.

Also also seeing a Monster Energy logo on 41-year old M.Schumacher's helmet kind of made me cringe.

[Teflon]

Damn that guy is just chilling while drifting through hairpins, he must be Finnish.


I think I'll try and get my hands on F1 2009 (the Wii one) to get a feel for the tracks. I always feel more involved watching Monaco because of driving it three billion times in Gran Turismo, I'd like to extend this knowledge.

Also the FIA fully allows teams to rock KERS in 2010, it's just that nobody wants to. Of course some kind of imaginary competent motorsport governing body would then change the rules so teams WOULD want to run this exciting futuristic overtaking-enabling tech but eh.

[Teflon]

F1 2009 is pretty much unplayable without a Classic controller (and Cube controllers don't work because L2 and the plus/minus buttons are just that vital to the gameplay experience).

So! I dicked around on the PC side of things and ended up installing rFactor, grabbing a fanmade (stolen from ye olde GP4 actually) Sepang and running free practice sessions on it in this dinky little Formula Ford type car. It was a pretty good time.

[Teflon]

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Man I guess I'm totally out of the loop on this (last F1 sim I played was Grand Prix 4) but I'm mighty impressed because I could actually tell these models apart if they didn't have paint. It even has Nakajima on slicks in the middle of a monsoon which is a lot like him.

[Teflon]

You know I'd never really thought about it but isn't Tokyo's highway system as represented by Genki ridiculously curvy? Wangan is straight but that's pretty much it.


There is actually a PC game based on a real-life Dutch highway called A2 Racer from the late nineties'. A series with a couple entries, even. It was developed by Davilex, which was surprising because their main line of business was accountancy software. I don't know whether it included the ring (A10). The real A2 feeds into the ring and I remember the game boasting of featuring the ENTIRE A2 (which is some 200 kilometers in length) so maybe?

Also I'd like to add how fantastic the story to the Shutokou Battle games is. In the future everybody gets around in little electric carts or automatic taxis or whatever and most of the roads are gone but the Tokyo highway system is kept around for the sole purpose of street racing in antique cars. I think it even went so far as to say the sporadic traffic you run into were computer-controlled dummies.

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What's with the little Mario Kart tire squeals?

[Teflon]

€179.99 Signature Edition of GT5

Includes a toy car and a wallet.

[Teflon]

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I'm just saying if you find turning the wheel aaaaaall the way round to be slow and awkward you can just put it in uh, 200 degree mode I think it was for less yachting-like action.

I wish real cars would come with thumbsticks and triggers already this whole steering wheel business is some 18th century bullshit.

[Teflon]

The speed vs. precision/feedback aspect of pads vs. wheels or alternative real-life car control schemes?

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I mainly recall R: for ruining the best possible game with the worst possible driving model. Possibly my expectations were sort of jacked up beyond any feasibility though. Quite possibly. I'd made a desktop background out of promo art and spent four months gazing longingly at it before the game came out and destroyed my capacity to froth in childlike innocence.

Hey in other Namco news I realized I now pass the system requirements for Ridge Racer 7 so I picked that up. Not sure how I feel about how much shit there is to do to your car in it VS RR6 as I kind of enjoyed the whole 'cars as discrete objects' thing and seeing your car autonomously beef up as you progressed through the classes , but on the other hand I also enjoy doing shit to cars so it's a draw I guess? I still enjoy stylishly drifting stylish cars through stylish locales while getting carpet-bombed with pounding techno beats so that's all good.

[Teflon]

Man that looks bizarre. That Ferrari somehow ended up with an intact headlight cluster halfway up the hood?

The chunky TV pixels are also visible on the damaged parts of the car so if it's a shop whoever did it cared enough to display his doctored screenshots on a TV then photograph them so it'd look consistent.

edit: oh nevermind

[Teflon]

I don't think the standalone WRC titles affect Gran Turismo at all seeing as the same situation occurred more than once back on the PS2, unless there's a fully-licensed WRC championship in GT5 I haven't heard about.

Good news though, I liked those WRC games, mainly because they actually included a full WRC season's worth of stages so you could do career mode and not constantly be driving the same 15 tracks or whatever.

Edit: oh, liveries and stuff. Well maybe they'll use generic paintjobs for GT5, I can't say I really mind either way.

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Okay I won't hate that looked like fun.

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I like Gran Turismo's little suggested gear indicator as an intermediate solution between full-on big HUD lines dictating your every move and no help at all. You don't quite have to memorize the entry speeds to every corner.
Of course there's also a downside to it: you don't quite have to memorize every corner so you can pretty much finish the game without ever REALLY learning the tracks. Unless you sear them into your mind forever by doing the endurance events.

[Teflon]

Got to mess around with the PC version of F1 2010 today. Guys driving a formula one car is HARD. I never made it out of the Bahrain practice session because using a Dualshock 3 I couldn't keep the car on the road long enough to sustain any illusions about finishing an actual race. The car models are ridiculously nice and the engine sounds ferocious enough that I kept short-shifting. I wish this game had a tutorial.