rec.autos.simulators

Just wanted to state my opinion and my 2 worth...

I recently bought a Sony PlayStation, and Formula 1 by Psygnosis.  I
must say it is the best Formula 1 racing game (yes, game...not sim) I
have ever seen.  Don't get me wrong - I dwell in games like The Need For
Speed, and love arcade-style racing games, but this one has a little car
setup to play with, and RAIN!  Whoo-ha!  And the graphics are literally
eye-popping, jaw-dropping, at thirty frames per second!

Like I said, just wanted to state my opinion...

John :|:

Yeah, it's a cool game alright.

Just a little warning - it doesn't play well with a wheel (e.g. Mad
Catz) - the pedal doesn't give you full throttle, the car is
undriveable in the wet and you lose the action replay facility.
It plays fine with the regular Sony pad though.

Only minor irritation for me is that there is no viewpoint quite the
way I like it - driver's eye view but without the***pit - but that's
the same as The Need for Speed, NASCAR, IndyCar etc.

Has anyone found a Playstation game that benefits from the wheel ? I
find the NegCon controller best for most racers (Andretti, Ridge etc)

Rally Cross and Andretti are both better with the Mad Catz than
anything else.  The NegCon is only used when I'm playing 2- player
games or travelling (since the Mad Catz is rather large for a
suitcase!)

Randy

Anybody else have trouble with the mad catz not being seen the first
cold boot of the playstation? I returned one because of this, but the
new one was no different.

I love the sim, and I am incredibly hopeful for the future of sims on
*** consoles (when N64 has a *real* racing sim, i.e., Papy or
Psygnosis, or Crammond, etc., I'll buy one the day it comes out)...
but I wish to god Psygnosis had worked a little harder on the AI. As I
said in another post, they are like Indestructable Eddie Irvines- it
is as if the AI was programmed to know that you couldn't push it off
the track, and that it can push *you* off the track.

Anyway, I'll say it another way- when N64 comes out with a real sim,
no PC presently on earth will be able to touch it for realism of
detail. Anybody seen screen shots of Doom64?! Sort of like watchin a
movie. Already, I think the Playstation is on a par with the fastest
PCs... or at least the near P200 range. When game consoles are
designed to be networked for ***, there will be no reason for
gamers to have anything but a $200 game console and an old 486 PC to
do homework on. At least for some time.

How is Rally Cross? I just can't bring myself to buy it because it
doesn't simulate actual courses. Or does it? I hear the driving model
is good, but that is only half the sim for me.

Exaggeration, and certainly not better looking than what the PC's
leading edge 3D cards can produce.

Not really.  Perhaps from a sheer graphics standpoint, assuming you
don't have a Rendition or 3DFX, okay, but the resolution is lower and
the RAM-intensive stuff like physics, AI and replay memory are
sacrificed.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong on this.

The Mad Catz is the natural fit for racers.  I don't drive my car with
a NegCon and it sure doesn't feel natural driving a PSX racer with a
NegCon.

You're robbing yourself of one fun game.

Randy

-DG-

Current N64 games are running at less than VGA resolution (256x224
doesn't look so bad on a blurry TV), with the processing power of
roughly a P75.  Just take a look at GLQuake, which on a P166 running at
512x384 gives fps in the mid to upper 40's.  Even at a lower resolution
and much lower polygon count, Mario64 isn't anywhere near as smooth.
While very impressive for what they do, console's are just no match for
a mid level PC paired with a decent 3D accelerator (3Dfx or Rendition).

--

Eric, I think you're off-base on this one, and  I say that as someone
who has a P-133 with a Rendition on it, and someone who also owns a
Playstation.  I would say that if you look at the BEST Playstation
games and the BEST PC 3D enhanced games, you'd probably have to bump
the Playstation up to be about the equal of at least a P-120 and the
graphics card.  This goes down when you start adding RAM-intensive
games such as complex simulators or strategy games, which need a lot
of RAM for the game AI and data structures.   The Nintendo 64, if it
had a CD-ROM drive for more permanent storage, would probably be the
equal of a P-166 to P200 with a 3DFX.

Randy

You have to realize that PC games are pushing much more graphical
information (3-4 times as much as the N64).  At equal resolutions, the
consoles could never hope to keep up with a decent PC.  Plus on a crisp
computer monitor no one would ever settle for less then VGA, but on a
blurry TV we don't even think twice about it.  Imagine your framerates
if you could run ICR2 at a lower resolution.  In SVGA it was near 30fps
the entire time on my old P133.  Once again look at Mario64 Vs.
GLQuake.  Mario is running at 256x224 with far fewer polygons as Quake
and you still get slowdowns (though not as bad as that flying game with
huge blocky polygons whose name I've forgotten).  On a 166 GLQuake runs
in the mid to upper 40fps, all while looking much more impressive than
Mario.

--

Point taken, and technically you are correct.  However, given that
there IS a resolution difference, what looks good sitting across the
room in your sofa would look horrendous 12 inches away, so from the
standpoint of how the user sees the graphics, as long as it can show
them in a crisp TV resolution, it doesn't really matter for practical
purposes that the same hardware couldn't hack it at a theoretical
resolution it couldn't use anyway.

Randy

Jon wrote :

Hey guys, I'm not so dumb I didn't calibrate the wheel. I found out
that I am not alone in having problems with the wheel in F1. The
'Official Playstation Magazine' editorial and readers letters confirm
that several people experienced the same problems.
It appears that we in the UK got the first release (as F1 was coded
here) and all its bugs. I guess they fixed them for the US release,
judging by your messages.

I'll ask Psygnosis if they'll swap me the bug-ridden version for a
later one, but I don't hold out much hope. If only you could get
patches like PC games...

That'll teach me to rush to the store on the first day a game becomes
available.

I personally feel a P90 with a 3dfx or a P133 with a rendition is superior to
any console as well it should be.

The part about a tv doing it's own form of filtering due to it's poor
resolution works in some situations. But for example if you pass a small sign
driving on a console it's unreadable, where as on a pc it's readable due to
it's sharper rez. As time goes by pc resolution will grow and where are
console resolutions going? The U64 actually uses a lower res. than both sony
and sega. By doing this they have to make sure they put their product in the
position where such a low resolutions isn't noticable. You don't see little
details as they use textures that blend well together. Even if the console
bumped their rez's up how far can they go and still maintain a proper base of
owners with higher resolution tv's?

Q.B.M.

Well, there is HDTV somewhere out there in the bright blue yonder.  :)

Randy

What is your point? Are you trying to state that the PS is equal to the
power of a pentium
processor? If you are, your wasting your breath. The fact is, that a
pent chip is designed
to calculate millions of data at once, which a game console cannot.
Therefore games that
are supposed to simulate car dynamics are going to be much more complex
and convincing on a
PC platform. The resolution on a television doesnt get any better the
farther you sit from it.
Your brain just "tells" you its a clearer picture, but the details do
not change. Wereas a
SVGA monitor shows minute detail to graphics. Therefore I dont see any
"point" in your "theory". ":>)

-David Gary-

Are you making a generalization here?  Newer consoles are using
incredibly advanced chipsets.  The M2, which is on the way uses dual
high-speed PowerPC chips, if I'm not mistaken, and that's in ADDITION
to the special graphics processors.  Would you like to take potshots
at the PowerPC chip simply because its going to be used in a console?

Yeah but if the frame rate sucks, who's going to enjoy the physics?

Since my brain's perception of the picture is the only thing that
matters, I guess I'd have to say :  SO WHAT.

Randy