F1 Fanatic

Easy peasy, and I’m sure many of my fellow commenters would agree.

Formula 1 ’97 on the Sony PlayStation.

Developed and published in Liverpool by Bizarre Creations (Project Gothem Racing, Geometry Wars) and Psygnosis (G-Police, WipEout) respectively, for a second attempt at a licenced F1 game on a relatively new console with relatively new 3D graphics technology (for home consoles, at least), it was an absolute stunner.

All the cars and tracks from the 1997 season, along with the driver lineup from the Australian round (barring Jacques Villeneuve due to his personal licencing – leading to the wonderful driver name “Williams Numberone”) the game had everything you needed. For the first time the series included marshalling flags, car failures, and you could even remove tear-off strips from your vison in the helmet-cam view when your visor got dirty, which it did. The game had all the proper television graphics from the 90′s F1 era. The giant yellow boxed with black text showing the positions (which I still miss to this day).

Excellently excecuted commentary from both Murray Walker and Martin Brundle has left many of their one liners from the game’s script etched in my mind including Walker’s firery trousered scream of “HE’S GOING THE WRONG WAY!! In all my years of Formula One, I’ve never seen anything like it!”, along with Martin’s answer to everything: “You’re right there Murray!”

There was even an arcade mode which let you powerslide your way round the tracks if the full on, 100% race distance 16-round Championship Mode wasn’t your thing.

And then there’s the cheats. Rather than giving your car double the speed like most cheat codes would do, these ones changed the look of the game graphically. There was WipEout mode, which removed the wheels from the cars and made them float, along with adding a beam of plasma from the rear of the car. They even banked in the corners. it was like playing WipEout with F1 cars. There was Virtually Virtual, which removed the textures from the game and replaced them with solid colours. It was like playing na arcade game from the early ’90s. But best of all was the Talking Heads mode, which added a little Murray and Martin character to the screen whose heads flapped along Terrance-and-Phillip style in sync with the commentary.

Sure there have been plenty of F1 games released since with better graphics, physics, more immersive season modes. But for whatever reason, none of these even come close to the sheer fun of playing Formula One ’97. So much so that it still gets a whirl in my PS3, certainly more often than F12010 ever did.

Formulaq 1 97 was probably my favourite and one of the best, Foermula One (95) was quite good too.
2011 on my PC isn’t mega, although i have had to turn the graphics and stuff down a lot.
98 was easily the worst game though

I will never forget seeing the original ‘Formula one’ on the Playstation.

I was amazed. The track actually looked like the real one. It had Murray Walker commentating. I was blown away. For that reason it has to be this game.

Recently I dug it out and played it again. Even all these years later it’s still a great game, and yields massive satisfaction when you really nail a lap of somewhere like Imola.

F1 97 for the reasons Ajokay mentioned. We were all talking about the game last night too :)

Not played F1 2011 yet but I thought 97 was a cracker and F1 2010 was cracking. The F1 cars in GT5 seem to be just a bit too twitchy for my liking…

Showing my age now, and it’s certainly not the best ever, but Revs on the BBC Micro was afaik the first game to try and in any way accurately model the tracks. It came with just Silverstone originally, later expanded to include Brands Hatch, Donington Park, Oulton Park and Snetterton and I spent HOURS on it :-)

And if you think the replacement name for Jacques Villeneuve in F1 97 was good, check out the cheesy names in this one… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game)

For me Grand Prix 4 by the fantastic Mr Geoff Crammond is by far my favourite F1 game, available for the PC.

It featured the 2001 F1 season so it featured teams such as Arrows, Prost, Minardi and Jaguar at the back of the field. My dad bought Grand Prix 2 back 1996 I think which featured the 1994 season and I loved it so as soon as this came out I snapped it up quicker than you could say Enrique Bernoldi.

The graphics were beyond anything I had ever seen and the realism was fantastic. I had started playing F1 games on the PS1 games such as the aforementioned F1 97 and the others in the series but they were always a little arcadey for my liking. Grand Prix 4 featured some really great racing and you had to look after your car and play the right strategy.

The game is still played by many today thanks to the nature of the game build allowing anyone to create new liveries and even tracks for the game. I remember fond days playing the 2005 and 2006 seasons inbetween terms at uni when I had access to a PC. Unfortunately I don’t have a PC these days but I’d love to revisit the game at some point.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/medium/2008/04/2002_Grand_Prix_4.jpg

Formula One 97′ is the only one I’ve played for hours and hours.