Be Excellent To Each Other

We don't seem to have had a thread for this. Odd.

First impressions were not good because Outrun has made me forget that cars come with a slow-down pedal. I slept on it and am playing it now and really liking it. I like these things:

• Voice commentary that addresses me by name
• A really good mix of arcade and sim with a side order of business management to follow
• Really, really lovely presentation values (the replay engine and cockpit views are particularly good)
• Innovative gameplay mechanism (the ability to rewind the last few seconds and un-make mistakes)
• The ability to select Welsh as a nationality
• Lots of race types, from touring cars, muscle cars, drift racing, open wheelers, etc etc

"...and gaywoods coming in from behind!"

sorry

Completed it on PC all apart from the 24 hour races.

Even at night I struggled to see things properly and at those speeds one fuck up means race over.

Frustrating..

Absolutely loved the drift, Touge, import racing and US muscle car racing (swinging the arse of an old Mustang was very satisfying).

It's also an absolute hoot online.

How? Do you chose from a list of names, or something?

Yes.

It pronounces mine badly wrong.

Does it have "Matt"?

Destruction Derby races (figure 8 ) warrants a mention too. Just for the crashes and the incredible replay system alone.

Uh... No. Only Matthew (it didn't have "Rich" either).

Perhaps the "nicknames" bit would suit you better. Boss? Chief? Dude? Dumptruck? Maverick? Mongoose? Vandal?

Does it have Owen? I'm fed up of games with a list of names making me choose a nickname.

I don't like where this is headed. Sadly, it doesn't have Owen, or Rev. They missed a trick not putting "Rev", "Doc", and some other titles in. "Prof" would be cool to hear from your pit crew.

I found GRID pretty much unplayable, and very unforgiving from the off. The cars seem to handle really weirdly and you're forced to get into shitty American muscle cars that probably do handle/brake like shite to be fair. Then there's that whole fiddly 'replay' malarky that really detracts from the fluidity of the game and the damage incurred is way, way too harsh given the aforementioned terrible handling.

Mind you, it probably doesn't help that I'm a ham-fisted, silly old twat with the reflexes of a slug.

As seen in Full Auto™.

where it fitted the game a hell of a lot better, it's a silly mechanic for a "sim leaning" game.

I believe if you play it on the hardest difficulty setting it doesn't give you the time rewind option.

Indeed, it gives incentives for not using it too. I'm quite enjoying it though I have to say not nearly as much as DIRT. There's a DIRT 2 coming apparently but there's also FUEL which looks like it could be a blast in multiplayer:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/fuel-hands-on_7_9

I played the demos of both Dirt and Grid and found them to be disappointingly arcadey. I remember when the Colin McRae and ToCA games used to be a lot more simmy.

If I want to play arcade racers, I'll play Burnout or Midnight Club. If I want a sim, I'll play Forza or Race Pro (soon, markg, soon!). The halfway houses that Codemasters put out these days just don't seem to be one or the other, and suffer because of it.

Fuel isn't really doing much for me, from the previews I've read.

I found GRID very exciting and as such decided to buy it.

If you're talking about handling "weight" then I can understand the sensation being missing from DiRT, but GRID has adjustability that takes it from weightless bumper car to heavy difficult to drive sim-like in about four or five stages. I'd definitely recommend GRID if you can blag it from Goozex as it's much more enjoyable than DIRT.

It does take a while to find the settings that work for you, particularly with all the adjustments that you can do to the way the car handles and the way the wheel controls it, but once you do, I found it a very satisfying racer. However, it does take a while to find that balance and that is subjective - I found it mercilessly hard on default everything off with the wheel initially, and I have neither the time nor the patience for games that make me restart every race fifty times to stand a chance of placing well. For the record I found/find the rewind function to be "not very good" unless you're on the last lap as unless you rewind before the accident happens it rarely winds back far enough to be of much use.

I've no idea what fictional colin mcRae game you were playing, pivot physics have never been simmy

Unless you just mean in game structure, where you're right of course.

Oh, really? Hah, fair enough then.

I've never seen such a profusion of options for the wheel control. Deadzone and sensitivity adjustment for all three axes, plus three motor control sliders for force feedback effect strength, wheel weight, and something else I forget. Pretty impressive, except that it's so comprehensive I just ignored it

I remember you saying this to me. So far, I've not found this, but I've been careful to promptly hammer back when shit goes wrong.

Where does PGR fit for you? I'd say Grid and PGR are pretty close in terms of sim/arcade balance.

As you move up through the difficulty levels, you drop from 5 to 1 use per race. Turn on "pro" mode, seperate to the difficulty setting, and the rewind thing is disabled altogether. You earn more reputation points if you do that. You also earn more rep points for locking the view to the "internal" setting, which I think is quite neat, particuarly as the dashes are lovingly rendered.

Personally, I like the time rewind. In an arcadish racer where I'm wheel-to-wheel a lot of the time, and hopping in and out of wildly different cars with very different characteristics, I don't have the patience to memorise brake points and such that are going to radically change from one minute to the next. The time rewind thing gives me the confidence to throw the car in a bit more aggressively on my first lap than I normally could, knowing I can back out of any errors.

I quite like the handling model. I went from drift-racing a Silvia, to track racing a Formula 3, to a time trial in a BMW 320, to another track race in a race-prepped Dodge Viper. The Silvia was tail happy, the BMW quite sedate, and the Viper overpowered, all as you would expect. And the brakes on the Formula 3 were breathtakingly effective. Sure, it's miles away from the work in the physics engine in Forza or Race Pro, but so far I'm having a lot of fun. Can't really ask for any more than that in my book.

How are you finding the wheel then? I struggled especially in the drift races with it but pretty much sailed through as soon as I tried it with the pad.

Loving it. Mind you, I love it in general. Sometimes I play a driving game just so I can use it.

I won my first drift race with quite a wide margin, so I must be doing something right. I did find at first I was falling into the usual trap of a force feedback wheel -- letting the wheel move my hands, which means you get into a feedback loop with the car see-sawing all over the place. That's from playing too much Outrun. Once I remembered you need to hold it still when it's bucking around I settled into it.

In HAW(ks - Ed) my callsign is "Lump".

Astonishingly, it hadn't already been taken.

Ah, you've got me there, because I do like the PGR series. I think it's more due to driving through real life cities than the game engine, though.

Nah it's not just you. I had trouble with it too. For example if you go on the analogue accel too hard at any given point the car will just start peeling.

I'm too clumsy to take full control over a button so stopped playing the game for a while.. Then Echo (our mate Al) told me about the amateur settings (forget where they are now) that allow your car to take a couple of bangs and make things easier to use.

So I just set the game to that and loved every minute. However, I didn't ever use that rewind setting because I didn't know it existed.

Ah right, cheers Andy. I'll have to give it another go at some point and have a fiddle - does seem to be a real Marmite game this, according to various reviews.

Apparently there are a number of critical updates also; when I tried it my PS3 wasn't online so couldn't download these. That's changed now, so these too might make a big difference?

They should yes.

I honestly can't remember where the setting was now. It's somewhere with that pro setting that Glyn mentioned.

Echo sent me the game specifically so I could play it online with him and his chums.. It took ages for me to find that setting (it's not very apparent) but it made the game just doable for me.. Infact I got a wheel and pedals for my birthday in Jan (ferrari ones) and I've never used them.. Maybe now is the time to reinstall Grid

Playing with MyFinger last night, we bought a Formula 3000 and my god it's fun. It's not all that quick, but the downforce means that, compared to the touring and muscle cars I'd mostly raced so far, it can corner at incredible speeds. We kept pushing it harder and harder and every bit of extra commitment through the corners just resulted in faster and faster times. It's the most fun I've had with the game so far, I think.

Yup those buggers are royal fun. Literally like throwing a Go Kart around the track

Forgot about them tbh. Meh, I'm going to have to reinstall this soon.

This game is irredeemably shit - it's impossible to use with a steering wheel. I've given it a good six hours, but even by fiddling with the difficulty settings, drivers aids and deadzones (etc), I can't get it anywhere near playable. It's incredibly difficult to drive in a straight line, and don't even try to figure out the braking zones.

It just doesn't know what it wants to be. It's got realistic-looking cars, tracks and championships but the handling is all shit and squishy. I loved the idea of racing the Le Mans 24 hours course, but I just kept either braking far too early, or too late. I don't really care about the Japanese drifting bollocks, either. It's just rubbish. What happened, Codebastards!?!?

I've stuck it back on Goozex now, and good riddance. I played Race Pro for an hour last night and it's almost everything I want from a driving game (at least until Forza 3 is out).

That's ok, it's probably the single worst interpretation of that course I've ever seen.