F1 Fanatic

oh boy! I am excite.

Dates seem fine at the moment

@RIISE

I would like to put my name down for this, I know I was totally absent last season but I had my reasons for that, mainly to do with travelling 100 miles to see the girlfriend every weekend. But now I’m living with her, so I will be free every Sunday.

I also get that my 2 appearances last season weren’t the most mature performances. My bad internet connection at the time caused me to lag a lot and my lack of practice made it so I absolutely sucked.

I’m definitely getting the game so take my application into consideration and hopefully I’ll see you on the track. :)

It’s great to know that you are keen to take part properly this year and I’m glad that I now understand what was going on with you last year. Over the first two seasons we’ve had a lot of interest in this series with a lot of people wanting to join and so I only want people who are going to commit to the series because it’s just not fair for people to take a place on the grid and then not show up or even let anyone know in advance that they aren’t going to show up when there are plenty of others who would like to take part and don’t get the chance to. I’m also not very keen on guest drivers, because this is supposed to be a championship and while it’s all in the name of fun and we don’t take things too seriously, I also don’t want people who we’ve never raced with before joining even for one race if they will act in the wrong way and spoil it for the rest of us.

I’m going to do what I did last year and have a registration period where people who want to join the series can sign up and then those of us who already have a place on the grid will vote in the people we want to join. That won’t be for a little while yet though. If you would like to rejoin the series and can convince us that you will commit properly to it this time, then you are more than welcome to put your name down and we’ll see if you get voted back into the championship. It’s the only way to be fair to everybody.

Can I come back? Please Mag? Pleeeease? I promise I’ll be good!

As for dates, i’m in Austin, Texas during the end of Novemberfor various reasons, so I’ll miss the warm-up race
Then I’m in Canada during round 1. But if we move it to the 9th, I should be back from the airport!
I’m also at some Music Festival for the race on the 30th of December, so that’s out unless we move it a week forward or back (or this can be my drop race, I’m cool with that).

Wow, this girl thing is taking up too much time.
Hopefully being on F1F will get my head back into “lonely 17yo doing laps on F12012 at 2am” mode.

It’s ok Mag. It isn’t going to stop me from lapping you.

Nothing has been said about online replays. It’s not been requested that much.

I don’t get it, really. I’d rather see online replays than… well, what have they added? Updated liveries & car shapes? Can’t wait! Looks like I’ll be once again buying the game solely for this championship. :-(

^ this wins

You can customise helmets and liveries this year can’t you? That’ll be sweet if we all have our very own helmet designs (I’m a geek)

Also I would say the biggest beneficiaries of online replays would be for championships like this – which I can’t really imagine they thought of catering like that for.

So I downloaded the demo and expected very little given how much criticism I’ve seen, which has probably affected my judgement to a degree. I’ve completed day 1 of the young drivers’ test (you have to) and two races in the “career” mode at Monza. I basically spent the whole time trying to work out whether I liked the feel of the game or not and the first thing I noticed is the braking. You now have to floor the brake pedal straight away and ease the pressure as the car slows. This feels much different to the 2011 game and on top of that, you’ll need to leave yourself an extra 50 metres or so now. After a few corners you get the idea though and it’s not much trouble.

I am absolutely delighted with one thing in particular with this game, and that is the heightened responsiveness to wheel inputs. It’s extremely satisfying to be turning the wheel at the corner rather than guessing how far before the corner you have to start turning the corner. This will also help us avoid incidents as the game responds not much slower than our own reflexes. But then again, it probably varies between different TVs and of course wheels.

For example, in this video, you can see how quickly I am able to counter the slide (when I turn the wheel to the right as I head into the gravel) and that the car has only just started to step away when I’m already correcting it. Of course, I failed to control it in this case, but I was more satisfied with the feel of how it unfolded rather than angry at the fact it had ruined my race!

So as far as handling, there are a few differences apart from the brakes. The first thing I noticed is that the cars feel much “lighter” in the game. It’s less clumsy and more nimble. But that also poses a problem. You’ve got to be concentrating at all times, because the car seems to drift across the track when you’re trying to go straight at times.* I’m not sure if this is something I’ll get used to or if it will cause problems when we’re racing wheel-to-wheel. But overall, I think I prefer the feel of driving in this game. I’m very pleased with being able to turn when I want to, but I’m yet to get the hang of not turning in early for every corner as a result of this!

The AI, even on the hardest difficulty, provides you with little challenge (but apparently it will be much tougher in the finished game), but their behaviour is almost life-like. For example, Fernando Alonso is completely ruthless and blatantly squeezed me off the track at the Curva Grande. True to life, he didn’t even get a penalty for it.

(*You can see this happening in the video below as the car seems to drift to the right after the move is done despite the fact the wheel is straight and even pointing slightly left)

It’s not an amazing game, and if it weren’t for this bloody cup, I probably wouldn’t get it, but I do think we could have a lot of fun with it yet.