Considering the time we've had to wait, and the endless "we want it
to be as accurate and true-to-life as possible" messages we've had
out of Microprose since March, there's some very concerning problems
with F1GP2.
1. The damage model is very questionable. Try as I might I cannot cause
the car to flip over as it would IRL. Driving it headlong into a wall
at 100+mph breaks off the nosecone and then I can continue driving. Why?
The car should be a crumpled mess by this point.
Granted various parts of the car fly off it you get hit by another car,
but not in a realistic fashion. If you scrape the wall, the wheels stay
remarkably intact. If you touch someone else's wheel and are flipped up
into the air, when you come down the most damage I've had is a broken
nosecone. IRL, of course, the car would break behind the***pit and
probably catch fire.
2. Shading - if you go under a bridge, the shadow doesn't darken the
***pit. This wouldn't be so bad if Monaco didn't have a tunnel. In
there, the***pit should darken and the instruments should become
harder to read.
3. Speaking of Monaco - why does the engine sound not change in the
tunnel?
4. The car still drives on rails. If you approach a corner and for
whatever reason don't want to take the ideal line through it, the game
fights you for control of the car. The best example of this is if you
come up to a chicane that you might want to drive over. Not possible.
The closer you get to the chicane, the more the computer fights you to
turn into it. The most appalling example of this is if you've selected
to pit-in but decide to go around again without cancelling the pit-in
signal. The game just will not let you go back out on to the main
track, but sucks you into the pit wall in an effort to get you into the
pits. This was one of the major shortfalls of F1GP, and one which I
really hoped wouldn't make it into F1GP2.
5. The other cars seem to have the same suicidal British-driver
instinct as they did in F1GP. If you park in a corner, they don't try
to go around you, they just pile up behind you and bring the race to a
halt waiting for you to move on. The prime example is the first chicane
in Hockenheim. If you've got a good line into the corner, no matter
where you're placed, all the other cars try to drive through you and
force you out of the corner. Other examples: if you tangle wheels, the
other driver just will not turn away from you. If you're tangling on
the left and try to turn right, the other car follows you. This is
doubly bad if you're approaching a corner as the computer car heads off
on it's seemingly predetermined route, irrespective of the fact that
it's tangled with you, and you, the gamer, *always* come off worse.
6. No parade lap? For an 'accurate' sim, this is a glaring ommision.
7. Graphics glitches: lots. Usually the scenery on the outside of a
right-handed corner. It's especially bad on the corner onto the long
straight at Adelaide, and on the 180 at the end of the long straight in
Magny-Cours. Cars-in-walls shows up really badly if you spin at the
Eau-Rouge corner in Spa and look back up the track.
8. What happened to wet-weather racing and wet tyres? I see no mention
of them in the manual, cannot select a wet race for the "quickrace"
option and see no 'W' tyres on the tyre selection. This was one of the
strongest points of F1GP and seems to have disappeared!
9. The cars. Graphically superb. They look like the real cars instead
of the generic ones in F1GP. Problem? One minor and one major. The
minor problem is that IRL the lead car for each team has orange flashed
on it (in this case Schumacher's Benetton should have orange flashes on
the front and rear wings). Major problem: They all handle the same.
Other than the colour of the***pit surround, they all handle the
same. They also all have the same instrument cluster. It would have
been nice for such an 'accurate' sim for the cars to handle
differently, and for the proper instrument clusters to be in there.
Proof that they all handle the same comes if you pick a Pacific car and
win a season with it with no fiddling or adjustment of the
game-standard settings. The real Pacific cars were so underpowered they
never even got a place in the top 10 finishers.
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It's an excellent game, no doubt about it, but I'm disappointed
that there are _so many_ problems with it. Especially considering
the amount of time we've been waiting, on the excuse of
"more realism and less bugs".
Now to the question: does anyone know if there are there plans for a
paintkit for the cars so we
can update to the current team colours?
--
*** Pass or Pull Over! ** NO AD BREAKS IN TELEVISED F1 RACES ***
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~chrisl/
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Standard disclaimer: The views expressed here are entirely my own.
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