Ah, memories. I was a fan of Porche Unleashed mostly because of my dad. He used to race a Porche in the 60’s. One day I sat down with him, grabbed his old race car, and proceeded to embarrass myself in a race, finding my way to last place.
We hit the set up screen and started changing sliders. My ignorance of cars was replaced by his experience (he’s also a mechanic). I won the next race easily.
I too am a big fan of GRID. No, it’s not a simulation but it very much is what it is. It’s got a competent driving model and a ton of cars on the track. It’s also got such a big bag of tricks in terms of variety that you can’t help but be impressed how much fit on just a single disk.
Side note about the AI: I haven’t played enough to start making overall judgements about the AI but it’s amazing how a few accidents ahead can enhance a racing game. It goes a long way to giving AI drivers some character.
Porsche Unleashed was awesome. I really think it was imperative to have a good wheel/pedal combo for that game. No NFS game since has had as good a physics model (well, I haven’t played Pro Street at all, but the NFS Underground Demo, and both Most Wanted and Carbon were way too arcadey).
So is Grid’s physics model pretty good? Maybe at TOCA Race Driver 2’s level?
AI in Grid is a bit irregular. Sometimes it’s very believeble, aggresive and challenging but still can make mistakes. But that’s the case in most of the tracks, i don’t know why in some of the other tracks the AI “loses” the capacity to make mistakes and just run and run perfectly, ever. /Points at Le Mans.
Yeah, the AI can be brutal at Le Mans, especially the S-curves near the end where the AI can go through them at nearly top speed, which takes amazing precision driving. But the AI isn’t as good at the rest of the course. At least, it isn’t most of the time. Occasionally, I’ll find an AI driver that takes the back-to-back chicanes at the end of the course perfectly at full speed, like I can, but most of the time, the AI drivers will be careful and slow down for the chicanes.
I usually try to save my Flashback replays for those Chicanes by the way. Those are so exciting to go through. If you can go through them at full speed, you can gain so much ground on your opponents, but if you make the slightest mistake, your car is totaled.
Man, I don’t know about starting the thread with the proclamation that you liked a Need for Speed game, and then say that GRID is a game you’d recommend to people who don’t even play racing games. Because I enjoy the occasional arcade racing game - I even finished dreck like the Need for Speed Underground career mode, and a large number of Burnout single player races, and I can’t even get past the first bend in the GRID demo’s regular race without crashing.
I am completely not blaming the game for this - I suck at sim racing, but consequently, I admit this game is just not for me, and I can make my peace with that. How do you then recommend a sim racer to someone who doesn’t usually play any racing genre games?
It’d be like recommending Operation Flashpoint to someone who doesn’t play first person shooters.
Admittedly, this opinion is based on a short, unsuccessful stint with the demo, and maybe the full game is easier for an arcade racer to get into. But as someone who isn’t terrible at arcade racers I’m just not getting how GRID can appeal to outsiders to the genre.
Yeah, I thought about this too. GRID does fall more on the realistic end of the spectrum of racing games. But it does it in a pretty friendly way. If you played the San Francisco track in the demo on Basic difficulty, that’s more of an indication of the way the game starts off. Yes, there’s plenty of opportunities to crash and burn, but in a fun way, with plenty of opportunities to rewind and try that turn again. Plus you can also restart the race at any time. In any racing game, there’s bound to be a little bit of trial and error and learning pains as you get used to the physics and controls. But with the Flashbacks, GRID makes those learning pains a little easier.
The game also doesn’t punish you for finishing in last place all the time either. They just recommend you go to an easier difficulty level in a pleasant female voice.
The demo had courses across the spectrum. The San Francisco track was fairly easy, the European track was super-hard, and the Asian track with the drifting was verging on impossible for me.
In the full game, it started off more on the side of the easy San Francisco track, then starts working its way up. As the player, you’ll also have to decide what difficulty level you’re most comfortable with as you progress. I think a newcomer to the genre would probably find it pretty fun to learn how to race at the basic difficulty level, and then graduate to the Normal difficulty eventually, and so on. I started at the Serious difficulty level, and sometimes move upward when I think I can handle it, and sometimes I move down to Normal or even Basic difficulty for the Drift events, which I’m still terrible at (but getting better).
I think it’s a game that will show people the best aspects of the genre more than any other game I’ve played in a while. Yes, it does ease you into it, but there will still be a learning curve. But when you do learn, it’s all the more rewarding when the game has something deeper to offer. I think my point was that if someone who isn’t a racing game fan actually jumps in and tries to play through this game, they will discover that if they like it, they’re likely to become a true racing game fan, loving the genre for more than just the action thrills that something like Burnout provides (and provides well).
How does its difficulty stack up with Forza? I had a devil of a time playing that game an am pretty new to the sim racing genre. GRID sounds great, but I’m afraid the difficulty would kill me.
KWit, definately easier to grapple than Forza. My experience with Forza was limited to the demo, but I thought it was pretty frustrating, even after playing for an hour, enough so that it never occurred to me to buy it. (In a similar genre, GTR2 on the PC was more forgiving to me mostly because of my wheel, cockpit views and vast amount of customization options). Grid, toeing the line between arcade and sim, and more forgiving with the replay mechanic, became accessible out of the box after maybe 15 minutes of replaying the San Fran race, to the point where I was able to remove most of the driving aids (which is completely up to you) and still place in the top three.
I really like the challenge level in GRID. Forza had a pretty flexible difficulty level, but it just got so fiddly trying to min/max the performance index. At first, I thought I’d miss the car configuration stuff that isn’t in GRID (even DiRT has all kinds of toe camber ratio gear downforce adjustment stuff).
But instead, I really like how GRID presents you with racing situations rather than car configurations. GRID never asks me to optimize my way to a win. Instead, it plops down a situation and says ‘See how well you can do with this one!’ If it’s too much, or if I simply suck at it (stupid drift challenges), I can pretty much skip it and keep moving forward by driving in other situations.
In fact, I’m pretty sure you can unlock every tier by only doing a single race. GRID doesn’t really expect me to have to drift race, or togue, or even demolition derby if I don’t want to.
Ok, first of all, since I use it for Drift Challenges, can we please not call it “moron” difficulty? It’s called Basic difficulty thank you very much. :) I’m not really ashamed of using it while I’m learning.
I’ve gotten good enough that I’ve graduated to “Normal” difficulty now for drift challenges, some of which I win, some I lose, so I figure it’s the right difficulty for now.
Basically the first big revelation that helped me grok the challenge is that the drift cars in the game have REALLY sensitive acceleration controls. So even giving it a little bit of gas is enough to keep the drift going after you initiate one by using the hand-brake. If you give it too much gas, you end up going out of control. I’m still not very good at maintaining that control for long periods, but with that revelation, I’m at least getting better at it now.
Drifting got a tad easier when I found out I should hit the handbrake AND be pushing the gas down while turning to keep the skid happening. It’s finding the right positional starting point, momentum and speed to a drift that’s so hard. “Combos” are what gives you the big points, and apparently it’s mostly due to getting your ass to swing as wide an arc for as long as possible. Counter intuitive, wanting to turn a corner not in the most efficent way, but sideways. I’m glad you can skip 'em.
