until tonight I thought RS2 was a decent racing simulation when I
finished my first season in so called career mode. Here is a short
summary of my experiences with that mode of "play" in amateur mode:
o In variable weather conditions, when the training session is dry and
it starts raining later, the AI cars won't come out to play, er,
qualify, resulting in the player sitting alone on the grid. This
happened to me twice (Barcelona and Suzuka), needless to say I
reloaded from a saved game and restarted the Grand Prix in question
until the weather was fair all around.
o The AI cars get out of their way to let you lap them, even as far as
hitting your car square and fair to free the "line" regardless
whether you're on it or not. Also, not much is happening during a
race. Far too less accidents, collisions, off-course excursions,
nothing, boring just like a real f1 race, but more so. Nearly no
overtaking except in the pits.
o It sometimes happens that a damaged AI car limps around the circuit
for the entire length of a practice session, oblivious of the
location of the pits. This sometimes happens in races, too.
o Driver performance seems to be random at best, the season saw a fair
spread of drivers ending up on the podium, reliability of CC's seems
to change as well (Hakkinnen failed to finish most of the time early
on in the season but caught up nicely later on). The Stewart was a
miracle reliability-wise, only one engine failure at Melbourne (I
forgot to turn down the RPM from qualifying, he he ;-)
o Worst of all, I won the World Championship in my rookie year with
Stewart team (50% race length). Now I was expecting the top teams to
fight it out and break their necks in order to offer me a contract
for the next year, but guess who stepped up: Sauber. Yep, Sauber,
sporting a whopping 40PS more than the Stewart. Of course I clicked
on "Decline", expecting further offers from other teams, but that
was it, I staid with Stewart. Yep, no further offers, just
take-that-or-***-off for the World Champion. Thank you.
o most annoying: sometimes, in mid race or upon leaving the pits,
the ubisoft installer launches itself resulting in that ***ugly
windows desktop rearing its ugly head at me again. Bad enough they
force Windows down my throat in order to drive RS2, but why remind
me of it twice a session? Has anyone else noticed this? RS2 is still
running in the background, upon exiting the installer I return to
the***pit but its panel is all-black. This bug appeared in V1.04
for me; I had never seen it until then.
Slowly I'm beginning to share F. Menard's (sp) thoughts of the RS2
beta tester team: I mean, how can errors like this make their way even
into the current patch?!? They must all have been promised new faces
and identities in order to give a thumbs up on that obvious bug
parade... damn, this could otherwise have been one fine simulation.
So, all in all I guess I'm off downloading Holger Bachert's 99 carset
an try racing in a *competitive* car this time ;-)
Cheers all around,
Uwe
--
Spam-proof e-mail: Uwe Schuerkamp <hoover at telemedia . de>
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~hoover ////// Phone: +49-5241-80-10-66
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