F1 Fanatic

It seems as if Codemasters are not too far from releasing the sequal to 2008′s Race Driver: GRiD, the game that has it roots in the excellent ToCA Touring Car games from the late 1990′s

They released a teaser trailer on YouTube at the beginning of the weekend just gone, apparently pointing to a full-blown trailer coming in a couple of days (August 8th):

Here’s hoping it’s going to be as good as the first game, which I was wary of at first, haivng played the demo expecting a decent touring car semi-simulator, but getting a full-blown arcade racer with ‘Touge’ and drifting events. But once I accepted it for what it was (and got it on sale for a tenner), it’s a proper good game with touring cars, GT racing, demo derby and single seaters… even Le Mans with a full day/night cycle

I always meant to buy the original but never got round to it, so I’m looking forward to this, even if I do wait until I can get it much cheaper.

Despite its lack of realism, I really enjoyed the first game so I’m hoping for more of the same this time around. I’ve personally grown a bit bored of the Dirt games after the first couple, so it’ll be good to go back to the Race Driver series.

I just hope the game’s more focused this time round. I’m not to fussed about F3 cars, etc unless they’re done properly. It was the major weakness of the original Grid, so hopefully they’ve fixed that.

I really enjoyed the first game to begin with, but once I got better and more used to it, I found myself deliberately spinning or slowing down just so that I could overtake some of the cars again, and that was on the hardest possible difficulty! I just hope that this one addresses that, and makes the other drivers a bit more feisty rather than just giving up positions

FINALLY!! I have been waiting for this game for years! Personally, I rank GRID up there with Forza 4 and Gran Turismo 4, so i’m stoked to hear the news. I just hope they have more LMP cars this time around :D

More on it here:

But there is a happy middle ground between simulation and arcade racing – the one occupied for years by the graceful power slides of the sadly departed Project Gotham Racing. Codemasters made a stab for it with 2008′s Race Driver: Grid, a lively, grippy and credible motorsport fantasy that won as many fans with its dramatic intensity and trailblazing features (including the first appearance of a rewind button in a racer) as it alienated with its departure from the real-world circuit racing of its TOCA lineage.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-08-grid-2-preview-no-assists-please-were-british

I’m definitely in the “alienated” camp. And I thought Project Gotham Racing was complete rubbish. It didn’t lie in “a happy middle ground between simulation and arcade racing”, it was total fantasy.

TOCA 2 remains my favourite game from this series. I really liked what Codemasters tried to achieve with the earlier Race Driver games, trying to incorporate lots of international racing series, but I don’t think they ever got it quite right. Still I wish they’d persevered with that instead of making yet another game where you bounce off the walls in an unconvincing city track driving a Mercedes SLS AMG.

THe only mode I ever play in GRiD any more is the Demo Derby (because, really, thats all the game’s physics are good for). This has been left out of this incarnation. It looks a little interesting, but with my interest firmly in simulation games, another weird half-way house might not cut it.

Thankfully I discovered SimBin’s RACE series last week (the official WTCC game). Currently racing Minis in my own one-make championship season I devised over the weekend. brilliant, it is!

@ajokay

In case you haven’t stumbled across it yet, I’m going to point you towards us at RaceDepartment, the mini races in particular are a lot of fun and (usually) have very gentlemanly driving standards.

http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/threads/mini-friday-mondello-intermediate-friday-august-10th-2012.54010/