says...
Definitely a fun game. The physics seem semi-arcadey (ie, too forgiving
of questionable inputs), compared to GPL and Viper. Of course, some of
that could be attributed to the fact that these cars have downforce...
Who knows - I'm sure that if I play enough with the settings, I can get a
car that feels more realistic, meaning "harder to drive", but I haven't
wanted to!
For me, both GPL and Viper are about the fun of driving: the GPL cars
are too fragile, too hard to control, and the damned AI's too good for me
to really enjoy battling it out. In Viper, the car's so loose, and the
AI is so clueless, that it's best to steer wide of any AI cars. I love
both games - I just choose to drive in 'practice' mode, with none of
those annoying other cars to contend with.
SCGT's different - as stated above, the driving experience isn't really
that realistic, and thus isn't all that much fun. This game is about the
*racing* experience, and that's loads of fun!
While I haven't seen TOCA, this game (at least at GTQ level) pretty much
approximates the BTCC series. A bunch of semi-ordinary vehicles driving
on tight little courses, nose-to-tail, duking it out. The game seems to
reward 'physical' driving, as it's pretty easy to give the opposition a
toot of the 'chrome horn' without taking yourself out as well. Just one
well-placed tap on the rear quarter panel in a turn...
The cone thing had me laughing out loud!
Damn straight - my only *real* complaint about the game is the cruddy,
almost-Ubisoft-bad user interface. Lots of weirdness in here:
the replay system - like most folks (and like pretty much every racing
game ever), I only want to view a replay immediately after a race. Or
immediately after an incident even. The replays are annoying to get to,
and what's with this "one per track" silliness? There should just be one
replay period (the current one), which you could then save if it was
really worth keeping.
also, there seems to be plenty of room for 'vcr' controls in the replay
playback. There should be separate 'forward a frame and/or forward slow
motion' and 'fast forward' controls, rather than a single control that
speeds up. There should also be an elapsed time counter, or something
that indicates where you are in the race, and preferably other info
(speed, position, etc.) GPL does this nearly perfectly.
Enough has been said about the 'locked' tracks & cars - all the stuff
should be available automatically for Quick Race, without having to win
stuff in career mode. I bought the game specifically for Laguna Seca...
Yes, its easy enough to enter a cheat code, but why have one?
The practice->qualify->race thing is clumsily done.
You should be able to escape out of a race (in career mode) and pretend
the race never happened, rather than DNFing. Most games allow this sort
of thing - yes, it's more 'realistic' this way, but given how long it
takes to run a season (with the default settings in GTQ, it's still 75
minutes of racing), and given how you can't (apparently) do anything from
within a race (such as muck with the video options, adjust the
controller, etc, etc), it just seems a little rude in its current setup.
At least give the player the option of *not* saving the race results...
Control configuration - what's with the weird "enter a key, then enter a
control input" thing? I don't want to enter keys, I'm using a wheel!
And *everything* should be mappable to a control input (as in GPL and
Viper). I have a Logitech WFF, and I've got three buttons left over that
I'd like to map to 'a' 'u' and 'h'. Maybe I could do it with the
Logitech launcher thing, but I'm religiously opposed to that sort of
thing. The game should be able to handle it itself.
Positional information: I like the cool number-line thing at the bottom,
it's a novel idea, and it mostly works. However, a little more info
would be appreciated. At minimum, a three-line display showing you, the
car ahead of you (race position) and the car behind you (race position),
and your times behind the leader. Hard to describe, but easy to see -
just hit F1 (or F2?) in Nascar 2.
A crew chief would be nice, to help with pit strategy. Since the pits
10% distance)) it'd be handy if you could know if the car in front of you
has recently pitted, will be pitting soon, or what.
A simple way to do it might be to color-code the numbers on the number-
line thingy. Have them start green, and slowly turn red based on how
many laps since the last pit stop. When a car pits, its number turns
green again. The real drivers certainly have this info (via radio info
from their crew), we should too!
One good thing that I haven't seen mentioned: you get to race Alison! :)
Weird bug, or something: Racing in GTQ, career mode, maximum opponents,
some drivers wind up in the entry list more than once, putting me in the
curious position of beating Steve Nowicki while simultaneously losing to
Steve Nowicki...
Finally, it's been a day already - where's the damned No-CD patch?!?
Cheers,
--jhb
