playing around 2 hours with it. I have a system with a pentium III 550
Mhz, a TNT2 (viper) with 32MbRAM. By the way my system has 256Mb of RAM
(it is for my job too, I am a programmer) so this may have helped.
To finish about myself, I have never played GPL, I am sure it is great,
but I cannot practice racing 20 hours a week, and I am primarily
interested in this type of game to practice each race track before the
real grand prix.
So the fact that F1 2000 include the Malaysia and US GP tracks is a huge
plus for me. Before F1 2000 I was mainly using MGPRS2
I do not have tweeked the game in any way yet, and did not play with any
of the set-up, just choose one of the existing ones for different
tracks. I have raced with no aids.
Positive things:
---------------
The menu system is great, fast and effective. Before racing, I like
having a nice display of the track with speed indication at the major
corner.
What I like the most about the physic model is the impression of lateral
movement. You know you are driving a very flexible car with huge tire
that has an incredible turn rate and can support a lot of lateral Gs.
The tire in front are very nice.
The elevation of tracks is very good, the Monaco climb (St-Devote?) is
awesome. I have not tried spa yet.
Over all compare to Monaco Grand Prix, the colors are less cartoonish,
the grass look like grass.
When you race not only are the stand full, but there are a lot of
Ferrari flags, Fins flags, and national flags of wherever you are
driving (e.g., Brasilian flags, etc.)
Suspension effect (like in Brazil bumbs) are well modelled too.
Call me *** but I really like the brake feel. it is fun to try to
modulate the brake and minimize locking.
I like the feeling of the gear ration, in MGPRS2 it was ridiculous to go
from 0-200Km/h using the first gear and then all the other gear for 200
to 290! I have heard an interview of Jacques Villeneuve tacking about
his gear selection in Brazil (like second to third in Senna's S)
and F1 2000 seemed more accurate there.
I really liked the opening video for the game, it is good to put you in
the mood for some good racing.
I have raced with all graphical options on, and at max resolution and I
find the frame rate pretty good (because of my amout of RAM?). But even
at best resolution I am not very impressed with the graphics. Which
bring me to the negatives:
Negative things:
-----------------
The race tracks: Brazil seem to me very good, Monaco the first half
seems OK, but I did not like the last section after the tunne. But the
Montreal track is a total disaster. I am from Montreal, I walked from
one end to another of the track, I biked on the track, and I ran with my
car on the track (of course not very fast!!!). This track is so bad in
F1 2000 that I did not know where I was while driving. It is hard to
describe, it is not exactly the layout that is wrong but the 3d
perspective of it. Things are too narrow like if everything is distorted
(are they trying to represent tunnel vision at high speed?) I will try
other track and report on this, but I would definitively liked to
opinion of other people on this, particularly from people knowing well
some of the other tracks. And unfortunately I do not think that this
will be fixed by an easy patch. In my opinion they would need to totally
redo the Montreal track.
When you want to reverse you actually need to push on the brake is if it
was the gas pedal! Totally stupid. I do not know if this is an "option"
that can be changed. I did not read the F.... manual yet :-). It took me
some time to figure this out.
The "vibreur" (Kerb?) seem to be too low and have very little effect.
The good news is you can easily use them as an extract part of the
track, the bad news is you do not bounce back on the track if you hit
them from the side.
Has was already been reported, the AI at 75% are sucidals! Fortunately
your engineer voice is good to mention to you where crashes have occured
which seem like a good thing due to their frequency. Again I have seen
here some of the suggestions to fix some of hat problem.
I think that the***pit view is too "low". The view is not looking "far
away" so it hard to find the apex of corners that come too suddenly. For
now I am often using the "page up" view where you see the car from the
rear (like a bird flying from behind the car). But then in that view you
do not see your speed nor your gear selection. A pity.
I miss the MGPRS2 ghost modes and training mode.
Graphically, the car look better in MGPRS2 particularly at high
resolution (1200*1000).
I have a Logitech Formula Force Feedback wheel and the effects are
barely noticeable. I was particularly liking (in MGPRS2) the little jerk
everytime a gear is changed. There is none of that here.
The motor sound is terrible, much too tiny (not in term of volume, but
in term of full throated roar). But this will be fixed soon.
Jacques Villeneuve is always too far back :-) :-) I hope this is
inacurate, but of course based on their last year result, it may have
been a good guess :-)
---------------------------------------------------
Finally my opinion about realism is that all these sims are very good to
make us better appreciate to art of car racing, but are probably very
far from reality. For example, MGPRS2 and F1 2000 have very different
"ideal racing lines" in some of the tracks. I thinks the fact that they
are so different show that we are still a long way from accurate track
representation.
I will report back in a few days, if I have other observations to make
that I have not seen already in the group. Overall I like the game,. but
I think a significant number of tracks have been really badly done.