I already liked this game to start with, but I wanted to see the whole game
with all of the tracks and cars, so I spent the $5 to get the cheat codes
from the codemasters site. This game is even more awesome than the demo
would lead many to believe.
Some cars admittedly feel a bit arcadish or at least not quite right in
their physics, but try driving the open wheel indy type car on the oval
track, and you may find as I did that I was crashing like I have not done
since the first time I played GPL years ago. It is much harder to push to
the limits for me with that track and car than it was when I first played
Nascar 2003, or any past Indycar sims. Also the track looks so
nice,beautiful unsurpassed texturing of the road surface, and runs buttery
smooth frame rates on even my old 1.4 GHZ athlon with my ATI 9600 pro.
If you are not predisposed to wanting to dislike this game, especially if
all you have played is the demo to base your entire opinion on, then by all
means get this game , it's cheap at 29.99, and spend the $5 for the cheat
codes. This game may try to do too many things at once, but it is full of
great little moments waiting for you to experience. It is truely a flawed
gem, with awesome potential. At times it outclasses some of the old sim
racers of past years, in terms of the graphics and the "feel" of certain
cars. Admittedly Codemasters did not dot every i and cross every T, when it
comes to some of the finely honed details that you will find in sims like
GPL, but the physics model works extremely simlike with certain cars, and
less well with others. Perhaps it is more a matter of flawed variables
assigned to certain cars, rather than a fatally flawed physics engine,
because some cars "feel" nearly spot on to me , while others are
substantially lacking.
I tried driving a truck ( Ford SVT Lightning I think] on two different
ovals, and it simply did not want to stay on the track with the high banked
turns even at 80 MPH, it would start to lose traction and oversteer in the
extreme. Not very realistic I suspect. However, with a few exceptions,
this games cars and tracks are simply exceptionally fun to play with. So,
if you are obsessive about authentic details in your "sims", and consider
anything short of Papyrus racers to be "arcade" games , not worth your gaze,
then you will never like this game. However, for those of you who love GPL ,
but still can enjoy a fun racer that lacks GPL's fidelity to simulating real
racing, i.e. SCGT, you should definitely give this games full version a
decent look, and by all means get the cheat codes so that you can really get
the full flavor of this game. It is truly exceptional at times. Also, if
you have the Xbox version, you really should treat yourself to the greatly
superior feel of playing the PC version with a forcefeedback steering wheel
and "pro simulation" mode. I could easily point up numerous flaws in this
game, but the bottom line for me is that I simply have not enjoyed playing a
racing game this much in a very long while, I am still contemplating just
one more race even after I finish typing this message at 3 A.M. in the
morning.
I have not been this jazzed over a racing game for quite awhile.