Whoa! What a thrill! After quite a period of time necessary to get peripherals calibrated properly and to get familiar with the options I plunged into a practice session. So far this game is really quite something. I think it's playing friendly tricks with the amount of traction seem to have, but it's crazy fun. I have a couple early laptimes on a couple of my favorite tracks. Tracks listed in same order as 2010 season
no ABS, manual transmission, traction control: off
Track | Best Time | Comment |
---|---|---|
Bahrain | ||
Melbourne, Australia | 1:32.768 Sept 23 | |
Sepang, Malasia | 1:40.322 -> 1:36.162 Sept 30 | I had tire simulation turned off |
Shanghai, China | 1:40.489 -> 1:37.562 Sept 30 | Very cool circuit once you get the hang of it |
Barcelona, Spain | 1:23.003 Oct 1 | 560th in the world today.. 3 seconds to get to top 100 |
Monte Carlo, Monaco | 1:20.935 -> 1:18.161 Sept 28 | A bit better |
Istanbul, Turkey | ||
Montreal, Canada | 1:18.931 Sept 29, 2010 | Fun track. 933rd in the world! Today anyway |
Valencia, Spain | ||
Silverstone, Britain | ||
Hockenheim, Germany | ||
Budapest, Hungary | ||
Spa, Belgium | 1:47.903, Sept 21 | Room for improvement |
Monza, Italy | 1:22.788 Sept 22 | Need to reproduce without T/C |
Singapore | ||
Suzuka, Japan | ||
Korea | ||
São Paulo, Brazil | ||
Abu Dhabi |
Ok, the game's pretty easy. There's no way these cars are this easy to drive. With all the aids off, it's still 'difficult' to even get them to spin out applying power.
Sept 24. Ok, that's not entirely true, with traction control totally off, it's possible to spin. It's one thing for the game to penalize corner cutting, but invalidating the next lap as well seems wrong and entirely against the spirit of learning the track. Often it's not corner cutting at all but going off the other side that is causing problems. If I'm learning a track (in the time trial not even anyplace competitive) and missing the corners and going off the track, sure invalidate the lap, but don't invalidate the next one too. I ran 25 laps at Monte Carlo and got 2 valid timed laps. Once I missed a corner and got stuck in the speed bumps and had to go back and forth a couple times to get out. First it invalidated my current lap then it invalidated the next one too. Stop the madness!
Sept 30. Discovered the Logitech G25 default USB.xml file deep in the depths of Steamville so I can apparently change my buttons now.
Something weird in the rain in Malaysia. Running some laps well down the order so I decided to look at the split times, and there I was 1.5 seconds faster than all the other cars with the exception of sector 3. That's something that is irritating on it's own, not having access to the third sector times when in the garage because the pit lanes are always in the third sector and the last lap is therefor always incomplete. It's not like I can run the menu system to get at the lap times while I'm still driving either. This might be the thing people are complaining about.
I did find some serious difficulty when I turned the tire simulation on in the rain. The slicks were unmanageable (as expected) and the rain tires were no great shakes. What a different discipline racing in the rain is…
Oct 1. More rain in Spain and I mean a rain that made Sepang look like a sprinkle. Puddles and big drops on the visor. I'd have a serious case of overgripitis if I ran a full length race in this stuff. Forums are alive with a Save game corruption bug that makes you start your career over. Glad I haven't hit that one.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
Helmut what are you trying to do? Get me to buy F1 2010 just so I can beat those times? Seriously, if you present me with a time then I will want to beat it. When Evolution released the Speed Weekend expansion for Motor Storm: Pacific Rift I was determined to get on to the world leaderboard and by golly I did. I'm in the global top 20 on quite a few of the speed events– put me in multiplayer though and I'm rubbish.
I haven't played a Formula 1 game since Formula 1 Grand Prix on the Amiga, and damn that's looking old now. It was a real looker at the time though.
Edit: Just realised that Microprose who made F1GP also made Stunt Car Racer. I played it a couple of years ago and was surprised how visceral it still feels.
Race Sim Central had a great forum area where people would work together to improve their lap times by posting replays and tips about tracks. It was a constructive place and not at all about self promotion and I thought it would be fun to do this here where I could learn somethings from you Europeans who all have a race track somewhere near their house. Do you know how far the F1 track in Montreal is from where we live? 3500km as the crow flies. In British, I think that's 695940 rods or 3.5 times the length of GB from Brighton to Stromness. The F1 track in Istanbul is far closer to you than the one in Canada is to me. When I tell people that I have a steering wheel in my office upstairs and I race simulated cars they get this far off look in their eye and make moves towards the exit like someone said they found mad cow disease in their salad.
So, both of you, all of you, it is imperative you buy this game and play it and enjoy it just so I have someone to talk to.We'll sacrifice goats. We'll drink blood under the moon. We'll have secret chants for when we stand on the meridians of the Earth to unlock hidden secret power.
Actually, in all seriousness, this isn't really the game for serious skill development. The replay facilities are poor and it doesn't support MoTeC, at least yet. It's not a game for agressive driving either being F1 they forgot to include the 50 cal attachments and armour. I think it's more about offering some fun multiplayer
I'm satisfying my thirst for vehicular destruction in Red Faction: Guerilla. I'm stuck trying to take out the wind farm. A lumbering truck doesn't have the nimbleness required to get to some of the locations, but a faster car doesn't have the mass and armour to survive the trip. Man I love it when the alarm goes to red and the response vehicles come flying in from all over. Chaos.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
I'd utterly abandoned this for a while until a patch is present. There are several issues that came to light that made the game unworkable in career mode.
The most recent update on patch details is here:
http://community.codemasters.c.....-news.html
There's a whole 200 page forum book of issues, from AI cars not suffering performance effects from car weight changes from fuel loads to the rather blatantly obvious problem that the AI cars don't actually drive the track. I don't quite understand the motivation for this decision. There aren't AI cars that are on the track making AI decisions and performing based on some criteria to establish times, the AI cars on the track are simply those ones near to you and the AI times for the AI drivers are looked up in a table somewhere and pre-determined. The result of this is that you have a whack of weird issues like tightly following an AI car around a congested track at Monaco and qualifying six spots lower, or pressing really hard in the rain in China trying to make up two seconds wondering why the AI is so damn fast then, through some sluething, finding that my sector times are all lower than the AI cars, but the overall aggregate time is greater for no reason.
These are immersion and fun crushing issues. It remains to be seen how well the/a/ patch(s) address these concerns.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
Here's hoping not; when I finally did sleep I had a dream of the tracks but there was a giant dildo on top of the car rotating to point at optimal lines. Updating to show recovery lines when I screwed up. While I've always been envious of those with a vivid dream life now thinking I'm grateful I've so rarely remembered mine. Dreaming about the expensive thin-soled shoes I've just bought and how they make me unable to competently walk sounds like a leathery ball of no fun. [Image Can Not Be Found]
grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!
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