rec.autos.simulators

  Tom Bromberger.

Spectrum Holobyte-MicroProse
World Circuit Racing

                              GRAND PRIX MANAGER

Personal Opinions by Dave Gymer

   I bought GPM yesterday (13 December) and played a quick couple of test
   sessions and races last night. I present below some initial
   impressions; you can expect this page to be updated as get more into
   the game.

   The game comes on a single CD-ROM. Many of the same observations I
   made about the Virtual Karts packaging apply to GPM too. The manual is
   slightly better, but still too spartan for my tastes. I like to take
   manuals to bed to read the background information, but this wouldn't
   last more than 10 minutes. Anyway, being a Windows program it's fairly
   easy to use, so this isn't a major problem. Like VK, GPM will autorun
   in Windows 95 when you insert the CD, although you can disable this
   feature using the control panel.

   GPM runs in a 640x480 window, which means that at higher resolutions
   (like the 1024x768 that I'm used to) there's a lot of screen left
   over, and the icons become very small. This is where the quick
   resolution changer in Micro$oft's Windows 95 Resource Kit comes in
   handy, which also highlighted a little buglette. If you want to switch
   to 640x480 to play the game, make sure that you do so _before_ you run
   GPM, otherwise the taskbar and any other toolbars you have lying
   around will cause the GPM window to shrink when you decrease the
   resolution, and GPM can't cope and simply chops off the bottom- and
   rightmost parts of its window. You will probably also want to turn the
   "auto-hide" feature of the taskbar on so that it doesn't obscure the
   bottom of the window although it will keep popping up - it may help to
   move it to the top of the screen whilst playing).

   The game itself is pretty neat. There's a really _huge_ amount of
   detail, from liasing with potential sponsors and component supliers,
   through allocating funds to R&D and test programs, to setting the cars
   up for the races and test sessions. It's all very confusing at first
   but it doesn't take too long to figure out what's going on and manage
   to start getting your drivers to qualify at the front of the grid.
   Winning races is trickier and I'm still working on it... This has way,
   way more depth than those awful soccer management games which have
   proliferated in the last few years.

   I think my only real complaint is the way the samples are handled;
   they're very large and are spooled off the CD whilst the game is
   playing. Even on a quad-speed CD-ROM, the whole process is rather slow
   and clunky, and results in the samples getting chopped off as you move
   between different bits of the game. Even the music is done this way;
   MIDI music via the Windows drivers would have been a much better
   choice, in my opinion, at least as an option.

Conclusion

   As long as you're prepared to stick at it for a few confusing hours as
   you work out what's what, you won't regret buying Grand Prix Manager.
   There don't appear to be any major flaws, and the game provides enough
   depth to keep you occupied for months or even years.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Copyright © 1995 by David P Gymer
   All rights reserved

   These pages are not endorsed or supported in any way by Spectrum
   Holobyte-MicroProse Software.
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