arrived in the mail on Tuesday via $3 priority mail....
Installed it last night, and as you might expect I didn't get much sleep
once I started playing it :-)
What an awesome sim/game! Loads of fun, reminds me of ToCA in the woods on
speed! Has better graphics, physics and tweakable settings for the cars
unlike the rather arcade flavor of ToCA or games like NFSIII where you have
no car setup at all! It also has real car damage which you have to repair
between stages, but your only given a limited amount of time to work on the
car if you damage it, so you have to be selective about what you want to fix
or tweak (assuming there is no damage, but you just want to improve
handling, etc...) I find this a rather challenging and authentic aspect of
the game, but not so annoying as to spend hours and hours changing intricate
care setups in order to shave off a second or less from a lap time (ala,
GPL, CPR, F1RS, etc...)
If your into Rally racing, and have been waiting for this one to come out in
the stores / retail here in the USA, DON'T!
Go out and order it on the web now! It cost $42.95 w/shipping, but ordering
over the phone or over the net means NO TAXES, so the shipping cost offsets
the regular retail cost.
Before I ordered it, I called around to places like Babages, CompUSA, Best
Buy, Microcenter, etc... and no place here in Dallas had even heard of it,
much less had it on their list of upcoming software titles! They didn't even
have any news on the Playstation version (which I would assume will hit the
USA market first!)
Not trying to sound like a commercial for Codemasters or CMR, but if you
enjoy driving a racing sim, more than playing armchair mechanic/engineer
like many sims require, but want more than just an arcade racer like NFSIII,
then you'll love this game!
Cheers!
Jay J