I use a 360 controller. I haven’t played RBR or Rally Trophy, but I have played the Colin McRae games and the DiRT series, and Microsoft’s Rally series on the Xbox, Gran Turismo’s brief dip into Rally with Gran Turismo … 4 (I think) and the recent WRC game’s demo, and probably some other rally games I’m forgetting right now, and DiRT Rally is definitely the most realistic sim out of all of those. It still has it’s little conveniences. You car can be reset instantly with just a small penalty when you fall off certain cliffs. When you flip over, the car is very prone to once again flip right-side up again if you just give it some help. Little things like that. But for the most part, the feel of the tarmac, light gravel, heavy gravel, snow, ice, asphalt, and cobblestones all feels just about right.
I had a horrible time with the mid casual league this time. I lost tires early in 3 of the stages. I think in the 7th stage my car finally called ‘no mas’ as I was just driving down a straight away. A peaceful end to a brutal event.
Video card did end up dying. Bit the bullet and went from a 660 to a 970. Huge jump in performance. I can run in high and average 60 FPS in the benchmark now. :) Doesn’t help me drive any better, but now it’s smooth as glass. Trying to run through the casual league, but I don’t think I’m going to have time to do it.
I think I may have to limit myself to just 1 of the leagues, not sure which. I just don’t play Dirt Rally as much as I did at the start and I don’t want to feel forced / rushed to play if I rather play something else. If I want to play more, I may just work on my best time in a custom even until I have times for all tracks and conditions, with all classes of cars.
Since I really don’t remember the details of each track from race to race, I think I’ll pick a car (probably the 60s mini cooper) and do each track with each weather setup. Then I’ll repeat with another car while the track is fresh in my head. Maybe I’ll burn some of it into my long term memory.
I can’t believe you are turning those times with a 360 controller! Maybe if I practice every day I’ll come within a minute of you. ;)
I personally prefer it to RBR. RBR was a bit slidey for me if I remember correctly but it has been a while. RBR was great though a close second to this. Not played Rally Trophy so can’t comment there.
Dirt is more down the simulation side of things for sure.
Unfortunately my G25 stopped working shortly before release so I have been using a 360 controller which is falling apart itself, it works fine, although I think, looking at other players, that you will have considerably more success using a wheel if available.
It’s not a panacea. I use a wheel and I’m consistently one of our slower drivers.
On that note, you have two US evenings left to put in your casual league times, before we leave the forgiving tarmac of Germany, with its gigantic runoff areas and only occasional immovable rock barriers, for the much less forgiving gravel of Finland, with its infrequent runoff areas and just-as-immovable forested surroundings.
Sorry to hear you had so much trouble. I haven’t done my mid-casual proper run yet. I did briefly try the first track and discovered that this Mini is quite different from the previous Mini. Much harder to keep on the track! Also, I have the persistent problem of the engine stalling out at the most inopportune times. Which is really unusual in this game, but happened to me multiple times with that modern Mini.
Greece just kills me every time—the second stage took me six and a half minutes.
Later on, in Finland, I answered for myself a pressing question:
You do not, in fact, need to finish in between the finish gates. :P
I did not expect, on the next stage, to end up with a stage win, either. ledShok must have been literally asleep at the wheel. I took a video, because it felt that unprecedented, which I’ll link once it’s uploaded.
Congrats on beating ledShok! Even if he had a bad day it is quite an accomplishment beating him.
You were beating me through almost the whole thing—you had me in Greece by a mile, and I was only a little bit faster in Finland until you had your presumably-crash.
Video. As stages go, it’s a pretty good one, by my standards. (I didn’t run into anything that I couldn’t knock over.)
Holy hell. I feel like I’ve taken a beating doing the Mid-Casual league just now. I honestly thought the easiest way to do Finland would be the 60s Mini and then a modern 2010 car, which LedShok sometimes calls Easy Mode. Well, the 60s Mini worked out great last week, but the modern Mini Countryman is NOT Easy Mode like the 2010 Ford Fiesta is.
Still, being forced to take my knocks, and finish courses with no rear left tire, or a bad radiator, or an engine that keeps stalling if I leave it idle for more than a second (like when I’m braking for an upcoming hairpin turn in Greece), dealing with all those things and still going and finishing each leg and just accepting the outcome. That does feel more like Rally. I feel beat up, but still… others here were beat up too, including LedShok.
In this course, I ended up like this:
… and I still beat LedShok by a lot, and made up the time he gained in other legs. Meanwhile the leg in which I was without a rear left tire for most of the leg was a really bad one for me, but I’m glad I kept going somehow.
The good news is, it’s goodbye to Finland after this. Phew.
Yeah, wasn’t the greatest of events for me. Took time penalties on both the third and fourth Greek stages, before a massive high speed crash on the second Finnish stage resulted in a ton of damage I couldn’t hope to fix in the final service area.
The windscreen cracked early in the third Finnish stage after a particularly hard landing, and I followed that up almost immediately with flat out powerslide into trees which left me with only one rear tyre. Basically drove two thirds of that stage on three wheels, and losing a rear is infinitely more difficult than one from the front - I should know, I’ve driven part of that stage with the front left missing on one of our league’s previous trips! :-)
The car looked in terrible shape going into that final night stage - the engine wasn’t sounding too healthy and I certainly had no appetite for running the whole event again so I just feathered it round and tried to keep my nose clean.
Congrats to all those that made it even 3/4 of the way through that event. I know I call the 2010s ‘easy-mode’ but I suspect their ‘drivability’ tempts you into pushing harder than you probably should, always thinking you can get yourself out of trouble with a dab of brake, hard throttle, and some oversteer…
Didn’t think I would make it but the dirt-casual is completed. Wish the last stage wasn’t at night because I sure wanted to take a picture of that hunk of metal with wheels (not 4). I have never heard a car making the noise I heard before. 8 stages with no stage restarts should not have the word casual in the title :) The 2nd stage in Greece drove me crazy, can’t count how many times I restarted the event because of a crash at stage 2. I think I can drive stage 1 blindfolded now. Still 20 seconds behind in stage 1 even with all the practice. Wish there was ghost car of the ledShok or Rock8man to practice with.
I might run the next mid-casual event tonight—not likely to have very much else to do, with the wife laid up with ill health.
Along with the new mid-casual even, the new casual event is also up (and does have stage and event restarts), six Finland stages. I would have been sub-8-minutes on one of the long stages, but I popped a tire and had to spend the 1:30 to fix it.
The mid-casual this week is the Subaru WRX 2011 R4 car in Wales and Germany. In the true spirit of Rally racing, I messed up multiple times, especially in the second and fourth Wales stages, but I kept going as best as I could, continuing the stages with a battered and damaged car throughout, despite my repair teams doing what they could with the given 30 minutes after every two stages. It felt good in that way to not be aiming for trying and retrying but just to soldier on and doing the best I could with the mistakes I’d made.
Finished the casual just now. There are so many ways to flip your car on those tracks omfg. I actually feel like I’m making progress at least now. By the last stage I was kind of just slowing down to just make it to the end as I was tired by then. For the record I used A LOT of restarts except for the last two stages. Last stage I got through on my second shot.
Thanks to Rock8man’s dedication to the spirit of rallying, I beat his time through the mid-casual event for the first, and most likely last, time.
It’s another nuts modern car, this Subaru. In Wales, the setup was a little too understeery for me, so I loosened the front and center differentials. The bump absorption was poor, too, so a softer suspension neatened that up. Much better than the default settings, that’s for sure.
Less than 24 hours left in the mid-casual. I hope more people give it a try tonight. I swear it isn’t as bad as last week’s Mini Countryman in Greece and Finland!
For today’s owner’s club daily, I actually bought the Fiat Abarth so that I could compete in it, only to have my tire burst on the first turn. I did something similar last night with the Weekly challenge in Germany on the Lancia Stratos (RWD). I wasn’t going to try to wrestle the Stratos to the finish line on a non-existent rear tire in a rear wheel drive car, so I spent the 1:30 in penalty time to repair it. And then I proceeded to actually finish and kept going and finished the rest of the weekly challenge too. When I got back to the menu, that first 1:30 penalty made that first leg at the very bottom of the comparative scores. But by the end of the last stage, I’d crawled up to the middle tier.
The spirit of Rally! I might never get that achievement, but I’ve got the spirit now, damn it.
I went and did the mid casual and screwed up on the same leg as Rock8man and never recovered. On leg 4 I drove 75% of the race on a rear rim, which made it very hard to control in the mud. Up until then fishbreath and I went back and forth for 2nd place. Kudos for driving a clean event fishbreath.