rec.autos.simulators

It's not quite as realistic in feel, but it's not bad -and definitely
a lot of fun!

Tim

How are the tracks in this game?

"Getting hit by a meteorite is an accident...
  everything else is driver-error."

FYI, I am a HUGE Viper racing nut -- it's still installed on my hard
drive, and I was very active in the CompuServe Viper Racing Club for a
while.  Great game -- and NFSPU is fairly similar (albeit perhaps a bit
easier to control than Viper Racing due to a better feel for the car's
"inertia," IMO).

-- JB

Bill

The game includes eight fantasy tracks, each of which can be run in
reverse: a fast oval, an oval with a chicane, and some fun road
courses.  I'm not aware of any third-party tracks.

One feature I'd like every racing game to steal from Viper Racing is
ghost car mode--racing against your own best lap.

--Jon

Andre

I have been searching for a better racer for quite a while, and have yet to
find a PC sim with nicer tracks or a better overall feel. Gran Prix Legends has
excellent handling feel also, but the graphics are inferior and it just is not
as much fun. SCGT looks nice and is almost as fun as Viper, but it lacks that
excellent "feel" of viper or GPL. The game uses directX for the video driver ,
so it works great on pretty much any decent 3D card
. It runs at 1024x768 rez with all features and options turned on, at generally
45 frames per second on my pentium 3 450MHZ with a ATI RAGE FURY 16MB
videocard. It is an awesome game, but it needs more tracks.

I also own both, and although I love Porshe Unleashed, I found the
whole "Finish First To Advance" thing a bit too linear.
I've been playing SCGT off and on since it came out.

I'm not saying I won't go back to Porsche Unleashed (the Factory
Driver campaign was super!), but I don't think it has the staying
power Viper and SCGT have for me.

Tim

I guess the tournaments in Evolution Mode could be somewhat linear if
you just play them straight through, but I'm really enjoying the in-
game "economy" aspects in NFSPU much more than I did in Viper Racing.
I liked Viper's career mode a lot, but I found IT to be a bit too
linear for my taste.

In NFSPU, the ability to not only upgrade your car but to also buy and
sell cars as well is very immersive, IMO.  Winning races can be one
objective, but for the past few days, I've been picking-and-choosing my
competitions in order to earn enough to buy the "Moby***."  For me,
these kinds of side objectives make NFSPU more than just a good
driving/racing sim -- it elevates it to the same level of immersiveness
as something like Half Life.

One other neat aspect, I think, is the fact that you "get to know" your
competitors through the Factory Driver mode, and then you find yourself
"racing against them" in Evolution mode.  It REALLY matters to me when
Billy passes me, or when Rolf is ahead of me and I'm trying to pass him
for position in a Tournament race.  Viper Racing, as much as I enjoyed
it, came off somewhat sterile and impersonal in comparison.  I wanted
to win, but I didn't feel any connection to the AI competitors.

The other part of the Evoultion Mode that I like is the club races.
There are enough variations to be had in the club events that I
probably spend more time in those events than I do in the time-
advancing tournaments.  I think it's very cool to buy an older 356,
repair it, watch its value go up, and then win a couple of club events
with it to increase its value even further -- and then sell it off to
buy another "beater."  I've really gotten to know the 914s, 944s, 356s,
550s, and the various iterations of 911s -- to be honest, unlike most
of the rest of you here, I have not yet completed Evolution Mode
because I'm having too much fun just playing around.  Quite an odd
concept, eh? <G>

With regard to my appreciation for the club events, I must say that I
am probably more of a "club racer"-type than a pro-racing wannabe,
which may be why I lost interest in SCGT in a very short period of
time.  I hold Viper Racing in higher regard than SCGT, but SCGT is not
without merit, although, like Viper Racing, I found it to be too
sterile overall, and the physics modeling just didn't grab me.  I may
have to re-install it soon, just to revisit my previous impressions,
but at the moment, NFSPU is tops on my list.

-- JB