When it comes to driving video games, isn't being fun more important than being realistic?
After all, video games are unique as form of entertainment. You pay a lot of money for them yet if you're rubbish and end up stuck on the first level, or get disqualified from a race, you'll never get anything approaching your money's worth.
Take the new F1 2015 game, the first such one I've played in a decade or so.
It looks very pretty, has replays that could well be mistaken for something on Sky at first glance and all the current drivers and teams are present and correct. All lovely stuff.
The blurb promise of which the game's maker seems most proud, however, is the claim that the F1 2015 has the most realistic handling characteristics yet seen in an F1 game - so real, in fact, that you can a get a taster of what it actually feels like to drive an F1 car.
To an extent that is true. For example, put the throttle on coming out of a corner with any lock on and a spin is inevitable. This is true of racing cars.
But it doesn't make it particularly fun; I always liked my driving games fast and arcade-like, and my kamikaze style of cutting corners and using other cars as brakes isn't really suited to this desire for ultra-realism. I bet a fair amount of people treat racing games this way.
Thankfully (for me at least) you can turn all the aids back on again, and concentrate solely on the fun business of trying to race with other cars and trying to win - using dirty 'unrealistic' tactics, of course, if I didn't get my own way.
Unrealistic, I thought, until I watched the Hungarian Grand Prix the other week. Watching Lewis Hamilton, Daniel Ricciardo and Pastor Maldonado making wild lunges from way back, using other cars as brakes, being creative with the track limits and making full use of the stewards at their disposal, suddenly I got the claim of realism after all.
F1 2015, then, has gone full circle. Like a movie being turned into a book, rather than the other way round, it would now appear that the real-life drivers have taken inspiration from those who play as them in the virtual world.
from Autocar RSS Feed http://ift.tt/1J25n4W
via AGYA
