How real do you want?
By F0zz

I dunno if this has ever happened to you. You fire up your favourite racing sim and tear-arse around in a souped-up monster for a few hours. With a force-feedback wheel and a big sexy monitor, it's the closest to boy-racer that you're ever going to be. Recklessness endangerment dressed up as skill. It's all good.

Some indeterminate time later, and only after you've laid rubber on the road and are physically downshifting for another audacious overtaking manoeuvre, you vaguely realise that you are, in fact, driving a real car. Slipstreaming a spaz chariot on the way to Tesco, not doing Laguna Seca in a GT40.

Why is that? Why do driving games make you crazy? It's not like you take the dog out for a walk after playing Call of Duty and start trying to bayonet old ladies with your pooper-scooper. Or dive into the privet bushes whenever a chav's Nova backfires. You wouldn't, off the back of a six-hour Counterstrike session, wander into a Spud-U-Like and commence bunny-hopping around, lobbing molten King Eddie's into terrified patrons' laps shouting "Fire in the hole!" Would you?

However, that's almost exactly how I ended up mangling my front wing this week. Not to mention innocent Corsa Lady's driver door, her only sin being that she was on the racing line and In My Way...

This is almost exactly how it happened.

It was truly a sobering, if not shameful episode. In the immediate aftermath, three things became cruelly apparent :-

- I wasn't behind the wheel of a Formula Ford open wheel car, but a nine year old Astra. (It is open wheel now, but for manifestly different reasons...)

- This wasn't Donington, it was a Cheshire country lane.

- The damage model was so realistic because it was indeed the worst kind of real. The ‘reluctant-to-disappear-even-after-a-reboot’ kind. Oh yes; bump-mapping and specular lighting quickly lose their charm when your ten-year no-claims bonus is the trade-off.

The roadside conversation with the Cheshire constabulary was...interesting. Fortunately it had been raining, and the bend itself was a bit of a known blackspot. The lady in question was, thankfully hysterical and thus unable to communicate the true horror of my incompetence. For myself, I assumed the dazed expression of someone who has been the victim of harsh circumstance. Barely travelling at any speed at all, officer, for such carnage to occur.

They were somewhat mollified by this, I thought. But deep down I was berating myself. There was no way that was a third gear corner. What should have been a controlled powerslide was, in essence, the fishtailing travesty of a teen's inaugural lurch in his Dad's 3 litre Granada. Why, if it hadn’t been for the rain and that dawdling bin...

The look on the scribbling Rozzer's face emphasised it plainly enough and, I almost fancy, caught him mouthing -- in time with the bobbing pen -- the single word : 'n00b.'

So I hate TRD3. Not because I'm trundling around in a ferchrissakes courtesy Smartcar for the foreseeable. Not even because Direct Line are going to Barbados for their christmas 'do' on the proceeds of my next premium.

They don’t dish points out any more. They just make you drive one of these, apparently.

I hate it because it is racing mana and entirely too realistic for its own good. Graphical, physical, mechanical perfection. And the rub? It is conceptually perfect, but mortally broken. The install -- a corpulent seven gig! -- is a reflection of the sheer depth and ambition of the drives on offer. Over Eighty world courses, seventy licensed race cars, Pro Career, World Tour and multiplayer options. Most realistic damage in any racing game. Yes, yes and yes. Seconded, endorsed and rubberstamped.

But the PC version is just so crashy and burny in entirely the wrong way. Their forums are full of outraged petrolheads demanding a patch. I'm afraid I have to join that throng. I've had blue screens, display driver corruptions and random reboots trying to get it running. Codemaster's technical forum troubleshooting recommendations include such gems as removing your soundcard and relocating it in a different pci slot!

I have nothing esoteric in my pc. Nothing is overclocked. All my drivers are up-to-date. I've never had to physically dissemble it before to get games working (nor, do I feel, should I) and these include such pipeline hungry beasts as FEAR, GT Legends and Call of Duty 2.

Nicole? Papa?

It is therefore testament to the potential quality of this title that I have been prepared -- like some tawdry tapedeck-fiddling c64 owner – to accede to the increasingly tenuous forum suggestions for getting this bloody thing to work! Either that, or it’s testimony to my desperation to get something approaching a decent driving game on the pc. One that isn’t more than four years old and made by EA.

Suffice it to say, three reinstalls, a scandisk, a defrag and a pre-druidic ritual involving fluffy dice and a lock of Johnny Herbert's hair later, almost nothing has changed. I say almost. I am actually, perversely considering myself lucky at this point because I can play it for whole minutes at a time without it going pffft.

It's just so beautiful, especially now that it caters for starving F1 nuts like me. It truly is everything a racing game should be. But I feel that every time I jump into the seat, patient cajoling and whispered exhortations will eventually give way to a full-blown, Fawltyesque thrashing of my blameless rig.

You vicious Bastard...

It’s probably stress. In fairness I have been feeling guilty all week. Irresponsible driving. The demolition of a sobbing housewife's car. A seeming inability to separate gaming from reality. Not the best attributes for a so-called ‘grown-up’ person. I wondered if they might send me on a driving safety course. Surely there'd be a simulator though? I'd spend the whole afternoon dropping the ride height a bit and shaving another half 'mil off the rebound dampers for that twisty section where the pelican crossing and the pre-schoolers meet. It'd be like giving a pervert community service at the local pool....

Get it sorted, Codemasters, for safety's sake.

April 2006

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