Conflicted Rev

For its full title: Grid - the latest Grid, not the first Grid, or the Grid that's Autosport and being released on the Switch.

I can see why they're calling it "Grid" in fact.

Anyway, it's new, and it's out soon.

Other than Jimmy's dodgy sound issues in his voiceover, this is quite a respectable race:

 And so there it is. not bad. Certainly not a sim though, and I think I'm conflicted on this game...

• Looks great
• "200Mph" seriously?!
• Close racing
• Nemesis malarkey means insta crash maybe?
• Good wheel support clearly
• Physics are relaxed

I'm interested to see what an open-wheel car race looks like, drifting in an F1 car or similar would be a bad thing.

And in fact, what about fwd - TCR cars are in this game, which is awesome, but if they handle like a fake thing that'll be a shame, and same for V8s as they're in there too.

I'm concerned this game will become a "if only they did the handling right, the content is exceptional game" - and on that, enter GT Sport. I can't reconcile what I watch with what I experience, and I've certainly tried. The video below, a great race, and well commentated. But cars for me just don't handle like this, what's going wrong in my gaming life?!!?

Better late then neveRfactor

In our quest to find a PC game that is...
a. Able to run on average equipment.
b. Not pricey
c. Pretty solid
and most challenging of all...
d. has some AI component so a full race can be had...

we found Rfactor2...

Courtesy of Steam and Studio-397 (what happened to the other 396!!!)

But it's not PS4 and Pcars2 (can't believe I'm calling that easy!)... SitRep time:

1. Purchased game
2. Installed fast! (tm) 
3. Updated not so fast... much time later*
4. Had a go, fine, but more cars/tracks as this is a mod max game
5. Steam workshop - tick all the boxes!
6. Yah, restarting the game, taking a lot longer now as it downloads 37Gb of updates.
7. And all good... but...
8. Don't like the in-car dash, nowhere near enough geekery to sort, so opt for plug-in upgrade.
9. ... and game death.
10. OnError GoTo 2.

So currently on Lap 2 of installation and we've had an emergency pit-in for rebuild...

And I've not started on servers and AI yet - I suspect that'll be hard too.

Overall - Buy a console, buy a decent wheel, buy a decent game, buy some beer and be racing within a very short time indeed. Or go PC and get the metaphorical bonnet up on your tech.


*Much time: My current unit of measurement is episodes of Red Dwarf - it took two, rounded down.
For reference: there are four PS3 Skyrim loads per Red Dwarf and ten Red Dwarfs per Windows 10 initial install. However, post-install is Microsoft minutes - which vary between nothing at all really to "going to bed to see if it has restarted when I get up" minutes...

GTQLD Rally Club

Dirt4 of course - till I can find another game I already have that I can do this to.

Link to the club: https://www.dirt4game.com/clubs/club/202375/gtqld

Was thinking South East Australia League, but Club Seal wasn't crash hot so we're sticking with GTQLD. If I had a brand that would be it...

Oh hell yes...

Pre-order incoming.

Can't wait.

I've been stalking my next RPG game, is it Outer Worlds, Cyberpunk 2077, or this...

It's this. It's definitely this.

Four All! (see what I did there)

My love affair with Dirt4 continues, despite WRC8 being released soon - and that is better clearly, it's four more than Dirt4!

And I've done a cool thing, a stupid thing and a better thing. In that order.

The cool thing is that I've set up a club, only a few years late, but it's here on Dirt4.
And coolerer, I've set up a championship!

The stupid thing? I didn't set restart up, so I managed a DNF on the first stage and that's it for me. I'm relegated to Clark-of-the-course status and can only sit back and see if anyone joins it. Hint: you'll win.
Worse, as it was the inaugural event I put it over September pretty much in its entirety. Which means that I can't have another one on the go, it seems. And I can't cancel it either. Boo.

All is not lost though, as now we have a new championship! And its great, as it has both front and rear-wheel drive cars, and it also has two events each with 3 stages. So all up six stages with service stations, and crucially as it turns out, the ability to restart the entire event.

I am excited about this for sure - it'll be a good race I hope, and if it works, well we can have infinate championships by simply regenerating the tracks. At least until the servers are turned off anyway!

More more Four

And yet more of my career in Dirt4.
I'm not far off completing all the in-game career rally stuff, and I can see how others say that it's a short game. But... after that, I'll take the time to build a decent championship and see if can share it out with a mate or two. That would be awesome.
But in any case, enough cars and largely endless tracks means I'll be coming back to this game over time.
Happy days!

Name dropping

Looking at the soon to be awesome S5000 class, I started to wonder about other classes in open-wheel racing. After all, my mind is mixed on S5000, fantastic to have an Aussie formula class, but watching vids on them they sound a bit basic, make them rev to 10k+ rpm and they'd be awesome.

Perhaps it's testing times only at the moment, or perhaps it's a cost-control process which may well help it's birth, but it's not F1 (not that it's trying to be) and I'm undecided on it.

So I looked about, and I found this, from a lifetime ago, see how many names you recognise!

If you think current F1 is boring, you might be right - but at least they're trying to fix it.

And in the meantime there's F2. I've not seen a boring F2 race, to be honest: Exhibit A
(Boo to Formula1 for not allowing embedded content!)

Only me!

So I'm enamored with Assassin's Creed Odyssey at the moment. I checked, apparently, the main quest is 36 hours and the side quests are around 76 hours. Huge. But I'm 90+ hours in and really only doing the main quest now, there is just so much content and so much to do.

For example, dropping into your local quarry to say hi to all the local guards...

And this is why you don't let kids play games like this.
Cos there's no way they'd survive that 0% health moment I had...

Making it real

So we enjoy racing and we enjoy sim racing. But what is sim racing, is it ultra-realism in the cockpit or tyre deformation models. Maybe even it's a photo-realistic car...

Recently Jimmy Broadbent, Stephen Baily, Adam Hodgkinson and Nathan Lupson (All four, not just the net star!) competed in the iRacing 24Hrs Le Mans. And I reckon it's about as real as it gets actually...

Note though, iRacing isn't hyper-realism photographic designs, the interior is 'functional' at best though I do believe the physics aren't half bad. No, what makes this real is the racing, watching this, especially some of the late night moments you can easily see some very close calls and proper "It happened in the early hours of..." events.

Worth watching if you missed the live event, and I reckon good motorsport in any case...

Hard viewing

This is hard to watch I think.
Mostly as it's VR footage, in a 90's F1 car around Bathurst. And as a viewer, I felt like a pea in a tin-can. I reckon playing it would take some skills just to not vomit.

Anyway, why put this up here, well its an example of what I reckon is some proper performance driving... Bathurst in a Formula 1 car is too dangerous to race, but of course possible in sim land.

And, Jimmy does this race proud, much respect to driving skills in use here, especially when you consider he's doing it in VR...