Photo Finish
F1 Championship Edition is one of the most excruciatingly technical racers out there. It's also awesome.
Published: February 28, 2007
Day One - Part Four
I think it's all starting to click. I just blew through all my remaining tests without having to restart at all. That's eight, plus the test that locked me into the second driver position, plus the one to defend my second driver slot from the guy I ousted when I whooped his ass. I honestly feel like a better driver now, and I'm starting to understand some of the nuances of driving a Formula One car (or at least as F1CE presents them). Stuff like feathering the brakes and tapping the gas then pushing slowly into full acceleration coming out of a corner. I can't tell you how badass it feels to commit to a turn, just mash the gas and watch my car magically follow the racing line perfectly out of it.
I'm now an honest-to-goodness team driver, and my first real race is the Grand Prix de Monaco. And I now have the choice to run a couple of laps around the track and have the game auto-configure things, or choose what session I want to use and then tweak things manually. Gonna go with the first one since I don't have a clue what I'm doing otherwise. I can't wait to see how I do against other racers...
Day Two
Well, I managed to spend about 45 minutes doing all the tweaks to allow the game to "evolve" to match my driving style (all it really does is start at the high and low ends of stuff like suspension, tires, etc. and then steps things up or down by little increments every time you choose to evolve things. It's good for guys like me that don't really know what 45% downforce vs. 75% does, but it's really little more than some default options. Still I'll take it.
What I won't take is spending all that time only to crash into someone on the first corner of Monte Carlo, lose a wheel and smash into a wall. All that effort just to have it all end so quickly :cry:. Luckily, the servers opened up and I've been playing with other press folks online. All I can say is the online stuff is awesome with even one person. You have the option to send an invite, RR7-style to anyone on your buddy list, or join anyone currently playing on your list. It's a pretty nice setup, though obviously it's no Xbox Live or anything.
Still, I think I'm officially hooked. This game is the shit, and well deserving of all the praise it's gotten... even if it is absolutely merciless in the realism department. Speaking of, during online races you can switch on/off the damage (if it's off you clip right through other cars). If the rules are on, though, and you accidentally clip a corner, you're given a rev limiter for a few seconds as a penalty. Pretty good way to go about it, I'd say.
Okay, back into some online races.
Day Three
Blowing a fuse in this rickety ass office is a bad thing. It means we have no power until the next morning when the folks downstairs open the auto body garage and let us in to flip the circuit breaker (because putting it downstairs was totally the smartest idea ever). So the office is now freezing ass cold, be we've got juice. Time for more F1CE!
A couple of things to note: the in-game keyboard sucks ass. I don't know why Studio Liverpool didn't just go with the default PS3 keyboard, because the one they're using is painfully clunky; no hotkeys for changing case or switching to punctuation, a hard limit in characters of like 50 so you can't do a full sentence, blah blah blah, whine whine whine. It's about the only real gripe I have with the online stuff, because otherwise, it's fookin' awesome.
You can compare your stats against a friend on your buddy list. You can do RR7-style invites to your game. You can automatically join a game if a buddy is online and playing (and there's room). You can even jump into a race as a late start, though I don't think your placement gets logged. The game tracks a shitload of stats, from distance to penalties, to collisions to how many places on average per race you gain. It's all pretty nifty and me likey.
