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)
>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.
Most of the above is sheer nonsense. I ONLY use the Mad Catz wheel
for Formula One and it plays VERY well with it. If you aren't getting
full throttle, you should go in and calibrate it. When I was comparing
the physics models of F1 and GP2, I used the Mad Catz, the NegCon and
the digital controller to test top speeds and they were identical, so
I can tell you for a fact I'm getting full throttle. You do lose the
replay facility, and Bizarre Creations did the best digital controller
support I've seen in a race game, but the rest of it is just so much
nonsense.
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
Quoted text (8 lines)
>>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. >Most of the above is sheer nonsense. I ONLY use the Mad Catz wheel >for Formula One and it plays VERY well with it. If you aren't getting >full throttle, you should go in and calibrate it.>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.
Won't happen. First of all, If you add a 3DFX to a P200, you have a
machine that's better than an N64. Cartridge permanent storage and
low amounts of RAM make the comparison easy. The N64 has a lot of
nice graphics hardware, but there's no graphics hardware in the world
that is going to calculate AI and car physics for you.
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
> >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.
Not with a Pentuim chip and 3Dfx. A graphics card cant handle the
calculations
of complex car physics and thats why home console systems look so good
but they're
shallow in "dynamics". Besides that your looking at TV resolution
compared to
a SVGA monitor.
-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
>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.
Randy McGruder wrote
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.
>I personally feel a P90 with a 3dfx or a P133 with a rendition is superior to
>any console as well it should be.
For certain kinds of games. I have both, mainly because of some
apples & oranges differences between the two.
Well, there is HDTV somewhere out there in the bright blue yonder. :)
Randy
Quoted text (11 lines)
> >You have to realize that PC games are pushing much more graphical > >information (3-4 times as much as the N64)...... > 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>What is your point? Are you trying to state that the PS is equal to the
>power of a pentium processor?
No, but there's more to graphics rendering than CPU math.
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
I have to chalk this on up as another victory in the which is better (PC's
vs Console machines) PATCHES!!! More and More PATCHES!!!!
