There is so much potential, yet Im starting to see flaws everywhere.
My main gripe is track accuracy. Even if those screenshots showed us the
tracks like no one has ever done before, Im sorry but they are dreadful. I
have been to numerous Grand Prix : Montreal, Monaco, France and Brazil.
I've seen Silverstone but not in a F1 event. I went to Indianapolis just
last year. And heck I've been watching F1 for so many years, so I think I
know the track accuracy. The game engine can't really model correctly the
real life tracks.
First of all, the C:PR ugly track texture is now back? The asphalt and
tarmac texture is not brown neither black in F1. FIA regulations make it
impossible for safety reasons. Monaco is ugly, it's very wrong in terms of
track accuracy. Buildings pop-out where there isn't in real life. Rocks
pop-out where there is actually buildings in real-life. Walls appear from
nowhere. The Armco is wrong mostly everywhere, and bumps are severely
over-done. Oh the bumps are overdone at every track, Spa is the ***y
funniest. Looks like a Motocross track near the start/finish line. They
all look wrong to me. Sure there is some corners that are very impressive,
like Les Combes/Malmedy at Spa or La Rascasse at Monaco. But overall
everything else is really bad. I mean WORSE than Ubisoft's game engine. At
least they had the corner radius, track width, and overall track accuracy
good, if you take some little errors and not being able to do
banking/camber. But how can you make people believe at Monza that the hill
before Curva Del Vialone is that high. Im sorry but it's not, by the half
of the height. Im omitting so much stuff here, btw. Montreal has serious
problems with track width and corner length, to the point that I was
laughing the first time I lapped the circuit. Spa also.
Im not sure of the reason for that. SCGT had a nice track accuracy. I
think there is a reason here, and it's the***pit view. First of all, you
don't see that high in the***pit. You don't see 2/3 of the wheels.
Anybody who has sit in a F1***pit (it's very possible) knows that. There
is something else wrong, and it's the fish-eye camera. Everything is
crunched on the sides, like taking a widescreen movie and cropping it for
Pan&scan. Everything is too thin and too high, which gives the impression
that there is not enough space. Yet, the kurbs are way too wide for FIA
standards. So you have the sensation per example on the Monza frontstretch
that there is no place for more than 2cars wide, when we all know in
real-life you can go 4-wide.
The car is also not rewarding at all. You can clearly see the roots from
SCGT on how them F1 reacts to their environment. Go at Monaco and you'll
sense it. Heck I can go around Loews without braking at all, just letting
the car go down at 40mph. I speculate that they had to increase the grip in
general compared to reality so that the physics would looks "correct". I
can powerslide into the corners without a problem, trailbraking way after
the point of no return of a real Formula 1. You almost can't trail-brake in
a modern F1. You have to drive with the traditional technique.
Brake/downshift, turn. Not turn, brake/downshift. The car is just too easy
to drive. I can constantly fastlap the car without any sense of being at
the edge. If anybody remembers "Virtua Racing", well it's the same attitude
towards driving. Enough challenging without any helps to make a rookie spin
or make you do a mistake from time to time, yet too easy to hotlap and have
incredible radius cornering speed. In fact do this next thing to look at
how the physics aren't quite right. Go in the sand/grass and get in a spin.
Put your wheel straight, and plow the gas. Infinite canned spins.
I won't go into other details much. The sound isn't really good but that
was to expect. I like the car modeling and how visually it reacts to it's
environment. Much better than any other modern F1 sim. The virtual***pit
is well made, if only you had the correct view of a F1 driver. Damage is
very well made and is actually well represented from the severity of the
contact you make. I really like the pit-crew telling me that I've just
crashed Schumacher. Hehe 8)
Heck I know Im whining, but Im the customer here. Im giving the ISO release
another day and I'll see if I cancel or not my online command. Because at
the moment, I am :(
This is not a pro-GPL bash at F1 2000. We all know it's not close at all.
I was at least expecting something near. I would consider Gp2 higher if it
simply had 3d-acceleration in terms of sensation of actually driving a
Formula .
Well, I was expecting that from a developer that didn't even fixed the
friggin head size!
--
-- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard>
-- May the Downforce be with you...
-- http://www.racesimcentral.net/
-- People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.