After playing the demo a couple of times on the two available stages, I was about ready to write a blog post blasting the game completely. I didn’t, and I came back to it a week or so later after my passion for rallying had been firmly reignited. The second time through the handling of the cars really started to click with me and I started enjoying myself. I looked online to see if I could find the game for as much less than the usual £40 as possible, as I didn’t feel the game was worth even half that. Luckily, and perhaps not surprisingly, I found Amazon were selling it for £15 and I decided it was worth the gamble on for that price.

It was one of my best game purchasing decisions. Despite all of it’s problems, WRC 2010 is an incredibly fun game to play and is equally rewarding if you put the time in to really perfect the handling of the cars. I should mention that only huge rally fans with a big interest in WRC need apply as there are so many other better options out there. Dirt 3 is right around the corner and will be far and away the better game in all areas where this game fails. Gran Turismo 5 also has a rally aspect in it, but the handling in that game is far less fun and takes a long time to get into. This is much more approachable and has a greater sense of speed.

Going back to this game though, there is a wide variety of modes in single player. Chief among these is the Road to the WRC. This is the main career mode in which you create your own team from scratch. You must progress through all of the lower divisions of world rallying in order to impress WRC teams in order to get a drive with them. While I like the idea of it, and I like how they haven’t excluded J-WRC, S-WRC and P-WRC cars from the game, the mode drags on forever and it takes many hours of play before you can actually drive a WRC car other than the odd one-off wildcard event. However, even these only become available after you get to level 4 or 5 of the events.

What makes this delay worse is the fact that the lesser cars in the game are just not as fun to drive. The 4WD cars are serviceable, but the front wheel drive J-WRC cars are just not fun to control as they don’t drift easily and the gearing on them doesn’t feel right. Most people who buy this game are going to be itching to drive Loeb’s C4 or Hirvonen’s Focus, and even though you can do it in the single player championship mode, most will probably want to do it in the main career mode first, and that’s a problem.

You could say that the delay prolongs the length of the game, but after a while it just becomes cheap and repetitive. Once you do get to the WRC cars, you will enjoy it even more as you finally get to ditch the front wheel drive cars in favour of ones which are always on the edge of control and put you on the edge of your seat.

Going back to the negative points quickly though, it seems that some car engine sounds are better than others. For example, the Ford Focus sounds quite good and won’t get on your nerves too much. The Citroen C4 on the other hand will drive you insane if you don’t turn the sounds down in the audio settings. Likewise, the co-driver voices are unbelievably bad. They only have a few things to say in each situation and after a while of hearing “you drive like a champion” after winning a stage, you’ll be very sick of it. However, the most annoying call has to be when you make a considerable impact with a barrier or something else solid. The male co-drive will yell “aaaahhhh”. The first few times you’ll laugh at it but after that you’ll be cringing just before you hit a wall when you know it’s coming. Obviously, as you get better at the game you’ll hear it less, but I found the female voice to be far less irritating so I’ve stuck with her regardless.

The other final problem with the game is that despite there being 6 stages per rally, in reality, there are only 2 or 3 truly unique stages. The others are either reverse runs of the others or are created by copy and pasting different elements of stages together to create the illusion of uniqueness. This is lazy game development but it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Even if you halve the number of stages in the game, there is still a considerable number of stages which differ enough to keep the experience fresh for quite a while. It would of course be great to have a game with exact replications of every stage run in the entire championship, but whether that’s actually realistic is unknown. I suppose when you look at how many tracks and cars are in GT5, you could see how it could well be possible with this generation’s hardware, but we just have to hope this happens at some point.

Overall though, if you can get past the abysmal voice acting, comparatively terrible graphics and engine sounds that remind you more of the drone of a go-kart than a roaring rally car, then you’ll really enjoy the fun handling and the full list of drivers, cars and rallys that the WRC license provides. It’s the first official WRC game for several years and while it’s by no means a great game technically, it does the job until hopefully WRC hire Codemasters to make a truly great official WRC game. Either that, or this developer produces something of far higher quality. I really hope we see one of those this year.

GT5 was highly anticipated for many years until its eventual release a few months ago. It’s not a game for everyone as a lot of gamers tend to either not enjoy or understand realistic racing simulations. Burnout this is most definitely not. I’m a huge Burnout fan too but this is a very different game, but we all know that.

This game, like the previous ones in the series demands absolute precision and rewards skill and practice. The 200 or so premium cars are things to behold. Stunningly detailed, with interior views that really make you feel like you’re driving the car. They even simulate the G-Forces and car shaking in this view. Sometimes it can be too intense to look at, especially on the oval tracks. It brings home to you the kind of punishment these professional drivers put themselves through.

Because I’m not a big fan of the other camera views the 800 standard cars, all without the cockpit view and in lower resolutions are almost worthless to me. They look awful most of the time and aren’t as fun to drive. It’s a real shame, especially as there are some great cars that are only available in standard versions, such as the Bugatti Veyron. 1000 cars is a great thing to be able to say in advertising, but in practise it’s a let down.

With this said, 200 cars is still more than almost any other video-game. I believe Forza 3 has approximately 500 in the special edition of that game. I wish Polyphony had cut the number of cars in half to that same number if they could have made them all premium quality.

Cars are nothing without tracks, and there is a great diverse collection of tracks in the game. From randomly generated Rally Stages to American Ovals, Le Mans and Suzuka, there’s something for every type of racing fan. There are even a selection of imaginary city tracks based on what could be possible if street races were held in those venues. As usual in Gran Turismo games, there are also some imaginary tracks designed to test driving skill to the maximum. These tracks are okay but they aren’t the best looking and sometimes the layouts aren’t entirely to my liking, but it’s a personal taste issue.

As far as gameplay, the cars handle brilliantly. They all handle slightly differently and you can feel this different when you race. Set-up changes, including tyre choice can make huge differences as well. Using the wrong tyre compound can cost you dearly, especially in b-spec races where the drivers can’t handle the cars and spin out.

Reviewers have been critical of GT5 as an actual game rather than a pure simulator, by saying that it’s essentially a 10 out of 10 simulator, wrapped up in a  5/10 game. It is true that some elements of the game are not entirely imaginative, and they could have made the interface a bit better, but it’s by no means broken and in my opinion I think those reviewers are being too picky. If you’re a fan of simulation racing, you will know exactly what you’re getting yourself into with GT5, and despite it’s few shortcomings, this is a very fine game that you’ll undoubtedly love.

I’ve spent a lot of time with it since it came out and I still don’t feel finished. I’ve got almost all the cars in the game I could wish for. I’ve driven every track many times and got about as far as I can with the special events as well as the regular A-Spec and B-Spec modes.

Why then would I want to continue further? Well, in a recent update, Polyphony added a new mode called Seasonal Events. This mode is updated every week with 5 new special event races for particular cars, as well as time trial and drift trial challenges with online leaderboards. It adds a lot of replay value to the game by making you interested in buying, tuning and racing cars you may have otherwise have overlooked. The rewards for these races far outweigh the cost of buying and tuning the cars. They also offer great XP to allow players to level up to the max of 40 a bit more easily by reducing the amount of grinding you’ll have to do. I assume that they’ll be doing these special events with almost all, if not all of the premium cars over time, so the game could continue to provide new reasons to play for many months to come.

Not only this, but Polyphony have stated that they plan to upgrade some standard cars to premium ones in future updates, as well as enable their online remote-racing service which you can use in a web-browser to play B-Spec races remotely. Your PS3 does have to be running and playing the game, but it’s still a nice and unique concept.

Just to mention some other small issues with the game, I feel that the online racing is below par and it’s disappointingly clunky to use. So much so that I don’t really want to bother with it until they patch it to make it much more streamlined and faster loading. Then again, most people, myself included will never race online and still play the game for months consistently and have a great time, so it won’t be a big deal for many people.

I can’t wait to see what else Kazinori and Polyphony have up their sleeves for us in future updates. In the meantime, if you don’t own this game, or even don’t own a PS3, you should pick this this game up if you think it’s your type of thing. I would also suggest buying an HD TV as well, since this game really gets the most out of it.

In general, it’s a brilliant driving game that just about met incredibly lofty expectations and you shouldn’t miss it.

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Last year's cover art. Image via Wikipedia

This week is going to be really exciting in the world of F1, especially for gamers. The Singapore Grand Prix starts on Friday with practice and continues over the weekend as normal. However, the new F1 game by Codemasters comes out on the same day and it’s going to be hard to put it down while the real action takes place. While I am excited about the race, the championship and the changes in track and decoration in Singapore, I’ll get to that in a later post.

I got the F1 2009 game on the Wii last year and am still loving playing it. The graphics are pretty awful and there’s no online at all but it’s just pure fun. This new game looks to have all of the fun of last year’s version, but adds amazing graphics, online, a better career mode and much more.

It’s so much more realistic this time around that it’s almost indistinguishable from before. So many details make this as true to life as has ever been achieved before. From amazing weather effects, season upgrades, realistic car performances, track evolution and much more. It’s all in there.

You would think I would have left all of the compliments until after I actually get a chance to play the game, but from all of the stuff I’ve seen on YouTube and elsewhere I don’t think there will be any nasty surprises.

I would go as far as to say that there is only one game that can come close to this as my personal game of the year, and that’s unsurprisingly Gran Turismo 5, which looks absolutely mind blowing. The amount of content that they’ve managed to fit on one blu-ray is almost beyond comprehension.

With that said, in terms of actual racing fun, they may be tied in that respect, but we’ll have to wait and see. All I know is that I’ve never been more excited about two games before than these, and I’ve been playing games since I had a big yellow brick of a gameboy when I must have been around 8 years old.

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Image via Wikipedia

IGN today posted their reviews of all of the Playstation Move launch games, as well as the hardware itself. Overall I’m quite disappointed. Not only are there no launch games that stand out as a must play, the hardware, despite a good review, is said to sometimes suffer from needing to be recalibrated. This is something that plagued the Wii Motion Plus and I hoped it wouldn’t do the same for the Move. I hope this is simply based on playing in a bright room, and that in normal conditions it will fare better. We’ll have to see.

Sports Champions initially seemed to be the only game that would appeal to me. It just doesn’t do anything I care about now. I have Wii Sports Resort and I want something different. I don’t think it offers anything that will stay fun for long at all, and three of the sports are exactly the same.

EyePet is technically the best of the games and may prove to be the most successful as well. The augmented reality aspect seems to work really well and will have great casual appeal, but only if the move catches on. I can’t see many families, especially ones who don’t already own a PS3, going and buying the bundle pack for I think $400 just to play EyePet. With that said, it’s still by far and away the best launch game for Move.

Personally I’m going to wait to pick up the hardware until EA brings out their Grand Slam Tennis game on PS3 with move support. We haven’t heard anything about the game for a while, but if it lives up to what I hope it will be, then it’ll be the only game I’ll need to make the move controllers worth the price for me personally.

I’d also love to see a Harry Potter game with move support as it seems perfectly suited to it. We’ve already had a taster of what it could be like with the game Sorcery which was demo’d at E3 this year.

Aside from those wishes, I’d just generally like to see the development community get behind the move and really support it with lots of quality titles. If they don’t, we may never see the full potential of the device come to light, which would be a huge shame.

Playstation Plus is a kind of Playstation loyalty scheme in which players pay up-front for a subscription for either 3 months or a year for £40 or similar to that in other currencies. I wasn’t really sure at first if it would be worth-it for me to join because of the fact that I already own quite a few PSN games, and I have been very critical of the minis program in the past and still am.

What ended up happening though was that my brother bought a subscription for a year to plus. One of the main reasons for this was because of the special offer for people who join in the first month, which is a downloadable copy of LittleBigPlanet. LBP is one of my favourite games on PS3 and of course I already own a copy. We should now be able to trade in our disc version for credit at the store and make back some of the £40 joining fee. Hopefully the rest of that fee will be made back over the next 12 months.

I’m not sure if the LBP downloadable version is tied to the same expiration date as other Plus content, but when I went into the information page on the game it said that there was no time limit, while other games I downloaded did say they would expire in a year with the subscription if it wasn’t renewed. Even if LBP does expire in a year, I think because LBP2 is coming out a long way before then, and it is fully compatible with all old downloadable levels and DLC, unless you want to play the story levels again, there’s not much need to hang on to LBP.

For people who don’t already own LBP or WipEout HD, the £40 fee is worth paying just for the first month’s content. If you’re like me and you do already have both games, it should be worth the cost to you quite comfortably over the year. It just depends how much you are willing to take a chance that the content will be what you want to play.

If they go forward and add further features such as cross-game voice chat and possibly things like online game save backup then it will be worth the price for even more people and will probably go on to be very successful for Sony. So far it looks like it has a good starting position and can only get better from here.

Last years Nintendo conference was actually very strong for the hardcore crowd, following the disaster of the year before, but they went even further this year to entertain the core gamers who generally attend E3. There were some casual titles this year but they kept coverage of them to a minimum which I thought was a smart move.

Microsoft’s conference was in my opinion the weakest of the 3 main companies. While Nintendo have seemingly learned from the past and decided to focus less on casual games and more on the traditional market and Sony have included a good mix of both, Microsoft have gone in the opposite direction which I think is a bad move. Kinect is the new name for Natal. It’s not a terrible name but I’m sceptical of how well it will work for more in-depth types of games. Can the controller free concept deliver on its promise?

I’m also not a fan of the voice control aspect of the device either. Voice control is hardly new and Sony could probably do it with their eye camera if they wanted to, but so far they haven’t shown anything like that. I just think that talking to a machine is always going to make you look silly and feel awkward.

The most important aspect of this whole thing is that even if the device is great and has good support software wise, will the price be low enough to sell units and more importantly get casual players on board. It will likely cost around £100 when combined with £200 for the system itself. £300 seems a bit steep for a casual gaming family. The Wii is considerably cheaper and while it doesn’t offer the same level of technical power and also requires multiple expensive controllers and add-ons to use multiplayer, the initial outlay will put quite a lot of people off I imagine.

Then there’s the problem of Xbox 360 just not being a very appealing name for anyone other than core gamers. They will have to work very hard with casual game advertising in order to really sell this to the wide audience that Nintendo currently enjoys.

Sony I think had just the right mix of traditional hardcore games like Killzone 3 and Infamous 2 along with Twisted Metal, innovative titles like LittleBigPlanet 2 and their foray into full motion gaming with Move. SIXAXIS was their first, unsuccessful attempt but I think they have the right formula this time around. Move is the perfect motion controller, or at least so far. You combine the accuracy of camera tracking with the buttons and accelerometers of the Wii Remote.

Move seems like the perfect fit for sports games such as Tiger Woods and Grand Slam Tennis, both of which I’m very much looking forward to. It’s far from limited to that one category though. Unlike Kinect, which I feel at this point is somewhat limited in what types of games it can be used in, I think Move has much more potential to fit into many different types of games seamlessly.

I think there are two barriers for the Move to overcome. The first is the cost of buying multiple controllers for friends and family groups, but Nintendo haven’t been set back by this problem so far so I don’t see Sony struggling too badly. Of course, Nintendo supply the Wii Remote as their default controller so that does help them but even so. The other issue could be the complexity of the setup. You need the eye camera somewhere in front of your TV as well as the controllers and possibly a subcontroller (nunchuk or duelshock 3) which is similar to the sensor bar but it could get confusing for some.

Moving away from the motion control aspect, I felt the rest of the press conference from Sony was strong. While there weren’t really any surprises, and Playstation Plus doesn’t really offer much that I would be interested in, I think they showed good demos of great upcoming games, and we now have a release date for Gran Turismo 5 which is very exciting for me.

To point out two negative sections of the show, I would say that firstly Sony put too much emphasis on 3D. The technology is still in its infancy and the TVs and glasses are very expensive. Hardly anyone will actually be buying it and I think they should be keeping it low key for the first 6 months to a year of availability because they’re spending considerable amounts of time talking to only a very small percentage of their customers at this time. At the moment Nintendo are the pioneers of 3D because they’re making it available to everyone for presumably a reasonable price.

They also introduced a new PSP advertising campaign. However, they didn’t lower the price and while they did show God Of War: Ghost of Sparta and announced Patapon 3, they only showed it briefly in a video of upcoming games. To me they are sending mixed messages. On one hand, they want us to consider the PSP still alive and kicking, but at the same time, with no price cut and hardly any talk of new games, you wonder if they even believe it themselves.

I think the lack of a PSP2 could hurt Sony badly in their battle with Nintendo and Apple for the next generation of handheld gaming. Nintendo have already stated that they will release the 3DS before the end of March next year. Will Sony have even announced PSP2 by then? If not then it will be likely at least 6 months or maybe even more between the launches of the two systems, and I don’t think they can afford to give Nintendo a head start. Especially because of all the hype and positive press that the 3DS has had surrounding it at E3 and beyond.

E3 was a massive show with so many games announced and shown off. I can’t really go into everything in this post, but overall I think this E3 was a great show with a lot of interesting announcements. 3DS was the big winner and Sony did a solid job. I think Microsoft have something to prove now especially with their motion control. They did announce the slim system with wi-fi but that’s only good to a point. It should have been done years ago.

I’ll have more thoughts soon, and will be back to more regular posts on F1 and all other topics. Thanks for reading.

LBP provided such incredible tools for creation, and while LBP did allow you to make more than just one type of level like MNR does with race tracks, it was hard work trying to figure out how to make it all work well. Yes, they were all 2D platformers generally, but the level design could play in many different ways. Modnation is always a track with a beginning and an end and some corners. Of course, LBP2 will take it to a whole new level with full game creation and other views than just 2.5D but that’s for later and possibly MNR2 to compete with feature wise.

But while MNR doesn’t quite offer equally powerful level customisation as LBP does, where it excels is in its mod creation tools which allows you to make characters which actually look like who they’re supposed to. In LBP, any costumes either made or bought were Sackboys dressed up as the intended character. While that suited that game, I love how you can find realistic looking mods for almost any character you can think of.

To be clear then, the customisation aspect of this game is absolutely incredible. What you can make and find online will astound you. With that said, this is a kart racing game, and without good driving mechanics, tracks, weapons and online play, the customisation isn’t really enough to save it.

While I don’t think the controls are perfect, and while I’m not a huge fan of all of the weapons and the shielding system, I think the gameplay is solid and while not up to mario kart level, it’s still very good especially for a system with very few other titles of note, if any at all in this genre.

I haven’t yet played all of the tracks but from the half or so I have played, I think they’re pretty fun and well designed. It was always going to be tough to compete with Mario Kart in track design but they’ve done well regardless.

Online play is great. There are multiple modes which include XP races which limit you to the default tracks and standard rules and custom races which let you host a race with your own track or another track you’ve downloaded. You can also join in split-screen mode but unfortunately, like mario kart wii, you can’t get XP from these modes or import your character from another PS3 profile into the game as a guest character like you can in LBP. This is disappointing but overall not a huge problem.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the absolutely punishing difficulty of the offline career mode. I thought this about inFamous too. Even on easy mode in that game it was annoyingly difficult. The career mode in this game will make you feel awful at times and even when you drive an almost perfect race with great drifting and slipstreaming skills, and using the weapons in the best way you can, it’s still a struggle to get into the top 3 and especially to win races. Yes, mario kart Wii was infuriating at 150cc and mirror mode levels at times, but even so, I got it done eventually. In this, I honestly don’t feel that I could be doing a lot better in my racing style and ability. There are some areas where I could improve but I don’t think it would be enough to make me able to win comfortably.

Overall I do recommend the game to kart racing fans. I consider myself good at these type of games generally. I’ve been able to dominate on Mario Kart Wii online in the past but this feels much more hardcore. Winning online here will take a lot of practise to give yourself a chance to really do well. This game will attract a more hardcore audience despite its family appeal and colourful art style simply because of the console it’s on. You won’t get the same number of casual players to beat for easy points like you would on the Wii.

Go and get this game, marvel at the creation aspect, and if you’re like me, hope that they patch the difficulty along with the long load times soon.

A couple of names have been rumoured for the final product since then. Those were Arc and Gem. In the end Sony decided on a simple name that clearly described the purpose of the device.

One of my initial concerns about the move was that they never showed a supplementary device to hold in the other hand with an analogue stick, as Nintendo have with the nunchuk. I feel as if motion control, to be used in a more hardcore way and to provide the best experience, you need to have elements of classic control as part of the overall setup. Sony now have announced their take on the nunchuk formula in the shape of the subcontroller which boasts and analogue stick, a couple of face buttons and possibly a trigger on the back as well as being wireless.

While many will simply say that Sony have stooped to simply copying Nintendo, my view is that a device like this is practically a must have for many types of games. For example, I was a big fan of Grand Slam Tennis on Wii which used a motion-plus remote and nunchuk combo for the optimum control. Having precise analogue stick control of your character makes it easier to focus on your shots and not where your character is standing. My hope is that now EA Sports will be able to simply translate across the same control scheme essentially, but the Move will allow greater accuracy and a more fun tennis experience, while also providing HD graphics and probably better online play. For this type of game, it really removes any chance of me buying the Wii version.

I also loved Tiger Woods 10 on Wii last year. It made great use of motion-plus as well and didn’t use the nunchuk which allowed complete freedom of movement. I expect the PS3 version, which has already been confirmed to support the Move when it is released, to take all the great elements of the Wii version and multiply them.

Of course, not all games are suited to motion control and it’s really personal preference as to whether or not you feel you would rather use classic or motion for different genres. I personally prefer classic control on a lot of my Wii games when given the choice. Mario Kart, F1 and more are much more fun with the more precise duel analogue setup of the classic controller. On the other hand, I can’t imagine playing Excite Truck, Wii Sport and Wii Sports Resort, Boom Blox (and bash party) and others any other way.

Gamers shouldn’t feel threatened by motion control because I’m confident that they won’t become the norm. They will be great in some ways, limiting in others but I think there will be a choice for gamers as to how they play.

Well done to the team and I’m sure Uncharted 3 will have a similar impact.

It seems that what we originally thought was an error effecting the blu-ray drive exclusively, may be an issue with the whole system. While we did already buy a new system to replace it, it’s like adding insult to injury when the old one dies before it can at least transfer our data across.

I suppose for some lighter users it would be not such a big deal, but we have a lot of content that we’ll have to download again, game saves lost which may make me not want to go back in those games and patches which can take hours upon hours to download.

Then there’s game installs. Those can be monstrous in size and although at this point in the system’s lifecycle, developers have figured out how they can avoid huge installs, they can still be a problem, especially for the older games.

What I ended up doing was just accepting that the old PS3 was dead and just put it away in its box and set up the slim. I do like the slim a lot more than the original in design. Below is a breakdown of the good and bad points.

Good

• Smaller and sleeker
• More symmetrical (doesn’t have the base shorter on one side)
• Uses around half the power according to reports
• No power switch on the back means it’s quicker to get going
• Control by HDMI is a cool new feature but you need a compatible TV
• Getting rid of the card readers means there’s less place for dust to gather, no one needs card readers anyway
• Nicer logo (no spider-man font)

Bad

• Only two USB ports
• No backwards compatibility (not that I ever used it on the original, but it would be nice to know it was there)
• Fans are not really loud but they are more noticeable than before and have a whiney sound to them which can be annoying, even when idle. I’ve yet to test it when the system is under strain though.

I’ll have more soon when I get a chance to play more, but so far, despite not wanting to replace the PS3, it is a nicer machine to own. I just hope that this one can last until the next generation of consoles roles around.