Be Excellent To Each Other

Any one playing this? So far.....

The annoying waffle from Dirt 3 seems to have gone for a burton.

The really annoying and stupid Gymkhana has been revamped so this time you actually know what the fuck you are supposed to be doing. It's more linear, and stunts appear one after the other instead of being placed randomly around Battersea power station.

All of the best bits from Dirt 2, Dirt 3 (though there weren't really that many from that one. Most notable is the rain and snow) and Dirt have all been rolled into one, as well as good bits from Grid (such as the figure 8 derbys)

New in is destruction derby, though in fairness it's not a patch on DD or DD2 from Psygnosis. Though it is rather fun.

Gone are the cockpit and bumper cam views (which is really super annoying if you play in 3D like I do !)

About the only thing I can really criticise it on so far would be that even in the races where you are not supposed to be smashing up your rivals there are obstacles and obstructions just randomly thrown on the track. Which kind of makes it not a destruction derby race, yet not a skilful go as fast as you can and get good times race.

It's stopped taking itself seriously, which IMO is a good thing considering it had been totally bastardised after Dirt* and it's now lots of fun without trying to pretend it's a serious race em up.

* It's still very Americanised. The handling makes it so you only really need to steer and accelerate and not even bother with the brakes.

Someone on another forum has finished it and tells me it's disappointing. It's career or joyride, and joyride is just driving around doing tricks with no other real purpose.

IMHO Codebastards lost the plot years ago.

Yeah it's definitely not to be taken seriously. It is fun, though. There hasn't been a decent smash em up racer for years now, last one I can remember was some sort of DD game on the PS2 that was quite fun. It had the platforms too.

I absolutely adored Dirt 2. It was incredible. Dirt 3? made me very, very angry. When the game launched Codemasters issued a statement to say that if you opted for the full version you would get extra cars and so on that download via Games for Windows Live. I bought it, only to find that these cars were indeed available through GFWL but you had to fucking pay for them.

Thus, once again the pirate got everything the paying customer did. It's a shame, because had they done it the non greedy corporation way it would have finally made it worth buying a game over stealing it. But no, greed got the better of them. There I was peeing my undies with excitement at the thought of hammering a MK1 Sierra Cosworth down a hillside only to find that my reward for paying for the game allowed me to pay for the Cosworth.

The only really memorable moment I can pick out from Dirt 3 was screaming down a snow covered mountain strapped to an Audi Quattro. It was literally like being strapped to a rocket. Sadly that was about as far as it went, because the only other new thing in it was rain and I see plenty of that to last me.

But the bunnying just did my head in. Some Australian bloke and American bird having fucking random convos and you being forced to listen to it. Seriously, they actually had minor lover's tiffs. It was hugely patronising.

Me and my Saturday night gaming chums have all got our eyes on this, purely for the multiplayer which looks like it could be a serious barrel of laughs.

At £30 we're not going to take the plunge though, I reckon this has got '£15 in a Steam sale within three months' written all over it.

The only good racing games Codemasters have done recently are the F1 games.

I'm enjoying to a point but the demo was somewhat misleading as it promised lots of Destruction Derby racing action (or at least I assumed it would)...but while playing it I never escape the feeling I'd rather be playing Flatout: UC.

I dunno man, DiRT2 was a masterpiece.

DiRT3, not so much.

The one that was riddled with bugs that they didn't bother fixing because "we're already working on next year's edition so we'll just ensure they're fixed for that instead"?

A good smashy racer, I'm told, is Ridge Racer Unbounded.

I can see the fun part of that. Sadly the destruction derby feels like you are tearing up tissues. The cars fall apart way too easily and quickly and it doesn't have that good old fashioned feeling of weight.

That's what I meant when I said it wasn't quite DD or DD2. The cars in that were heavy and handled like buckets of lead. They also came together with convincing crunch.

That seems to be missing a little in DS. It's still fun mind.

From a game standpoint I agree. From a "mass market to a mainly American audience" not so.

The reason they changed their games was because of the pounding Dirt 2 took in reviews. "The handling is too slippy waaaah". Grid got it too. Read an English review though? no mention of that.

I mean shit, in Dirt 3 the car automatically brakes, automatically steers and there's a whacking great racing line slapped down the track FFS. I mean really, if you don't understand the logistics of a racing line and gravity etc you really shouldn't be playing a game like that.

That's basically where the bastardisation came in. It came in to make the game appeal to people who didn't quite understand the philosophy of realistic car handling.

Grid was a real bugger to master. Once you "got it" though and started treating your analogue stick with tender loving care it was immensely satisfying. Swinging the arse of a Mustang out around corners and actually getting it right was amazing. The Touge races were equally as brilliant as they were rock hard.

But yes. The game has been raped since the CMC days. All about the profit now.

Oh, but people want feel good at games without any effort! They have busy lives and want rewind functions and other crutches so they can herp derp their way to an unbroken streak of hollow victories!

F1 2010 is relatively bug-free as they released a massive patch about three months after it came out, but hey, don't let facts get in the way of a patented PerkiesRant^TM.

I never played it, that info is from when I still visited that great bastion of quality journalism and intelligent, reasonable readers: EuroGamer. Every article about F1 2010 had a comments section filled with descriptions of bugs and issues.

I'm in two minds about this sort of stuff.

On the one hand I take your point and it is valid to an extent, but on the other hand a lot of us 'first generation video games players' are now pushing up to 40 years old or more, and we do have busy lives and we do have a limited amount of gaming time and sometimes little crutches like a limited rewind function can make a lot of difference to our overall enjoyment of a game.

(And IIRC DiRT3 and any other game of this ilk always has a hardcore mode or simply the option to just turn all that shit off, so it's not like you have to use the crutches.)

The same debate is going on with WoW and has been for a while, since they introduced looking for group and 'LFG raid difficulty' etc etc and the hardcore give it 'OMFG they're nerfing our game!' and me and my mates are just like 'Woohoo! We finally get to see raid content without having to raid three nights a week which we simply cannot fucking do'.

I don't see anything wrong with games 'making people feel good without any effort', games are supposed to make people feel good, they are entertainment after all. As long as folks have the option to turn the stuff off that they don't like, I don't see the problem with giving everyone else the choice to use it or not.

Turn off every assist in DiRT3 and use one of the insane Group B rally cars, and it's as tough a rally gaming challenge as you'll get.

If it was just that then I could understand it more. However, not only did they do that to Dirt 3 but they also filled it with piles of verbal dialogue such as...

Man with sort of Americanised Australian accent -

"Wow you won that race !"

Vapid annoying American woman -

"Yeah he did, and we have a surprise for you !"

Annoying Ausmerican man -

"Sshhhh, don't ruin it you'll spoil the surprise !".

I mean seriously, that shit was so fucking puke worthy it ruined the game. What made it even worse was it was totally and utterly cheesy and you couldn't skip it. Dirt 3 was basically a 2 minute race followed by 5 minutes of verbal diarrhoea. The actual racing was completely and totally overrun by crap you couldn't skip.

It was bad enough in Dirt 2, but at least Dirt 2 had lots and lots of amazing races. The Trailblazer for example was sheer exhilaration.

So whilst I can fully understand a company wanting to make their game appeal to some one who just wants the satisfaction of being called a good driver there is a limit to how much cheese you should pour on. If it gets to the point that it makes you want to puke then you have obviously done something very very wrong.

Which just makes me wonder who actually tested the game. Well, that's if any one tested it at all. Because surely one of them would have stood up and said "Look man, enough is enough. Shut these two annoying cunts up and just let us get down to the goody".

Not sure if you read the article in CPC a couple of months ago Alex, but it was basically based on "Why are companies basically hell bent on giving us what they think we want ,rather than actually listening to people. If they listened then they wouldn't be sitting around wondering why a product failed".

Did you play the very first TOCA: Race Driver? I was so excited that the TOCA series was finally coming to PS2, rushed out and got it. Oh dear. Terrible cutscenes of badly animated characters blundering around, completely failing to engage me.

No problem, my housemates will still get a kick out of the split screen racing! No! Everything bar the very first championship's tracks and a handful of cars are locked until you endure the awful story mode.

IIRC I bought it. But I was bored before it even begun. I should have it somewhere tbh.

I'd forgotten there was a thread about this and I went and hired it out. It's utter dogshit, quite the worst driving game I've played for years. The races are sort of ok but they are few and far between with the demolition derby twaddle making up the rest of it, but the damage model isnt good enough to make that fun or interesting. Properly terrible, even the gymkhana crap is somehow worse than it was. Avoid at all costs.

That said I hope it means that Dirt 4 will be more of a rally sim, as that's what they are claiming.

If you want a proper rally sum, look no further than the WRC series. The Codemasters games (F1 aside) are getting worse and worse.

Isn't that what they claimed with Dirt 3?

I miss the old (PS2) WRC games. It was done in the style of the TV coverage and they were fantastic.

But when you were actually rallying the Dirt games were pretty excellent. Not played the second one but the first WRC game was properly rubbish to drive, the handling was just awful. I'll wait for the reviews and that but it seems like they are going to try and make a game that appeals to rally fans, it certainly doesn't seem to be outside the realms of possibility given what they've done with the F1 games.