1) I like the graphics...they really do have that cool kind of hazy light-bloom effect, and I kinda dig that. The cars look good enough considering the massive amounts of damage they can take, and the tracks are nice and detailed AFAIC.

2) I absolutely hate the physics...don't bother playing with a wheel, you spend more time fighting the rubberband effect than you do concentrating on keeping a good line. ie: You take a turn and you fight the left/right/left/right effect all the way down the straight as you recover, even after adjusting deadzone and linearity it was really quite annoying. With the pads I came in first in the two races my first try out. :P With the wheel it was a struggle to figure out when I was going to over/understeer, there is no feedback at all that let me know when that was about to happen.

Whoever said "this game has the best FF effects so far" is either a paid employee or a straight-up dope.

When playing online (Leff, thanks for the invite, but get a mic!) here is how every race went:

- Start off at race, immediately get slammed into wrecks as people try to go through you. No joke, 16 races and I was put into the wall or took immediate major damage within 5 seconds of the start. Really bad.

- Spend the entire rest of the race fighting the wonky steering because your car is now "damaged". I was lucky, I managed to place 4th (or wrecked) in almost every race...and most of the time the people at the front of the pack stayed there, able to avoid the carnage at the rear or the dreaded "First turn".

So disappointing...the cars just dont feel right.......kinda hard to get past that part. In ranking of Car Control I'd put it this way:

REALISTIC to NON-REALISTIC (bottom) of the games I own:
FORZA2
Test Drive Unlimited when properly set up w/ a wheel
Dirt
PGR4/3
NFS games
GRID
Ridge Racer

:D

Wow, I am surprised you have TDU up that high and sad that GRID is that low on your list.

A separate thread was definitely necessary, thanks for your thoughts!

"Wow, I am surprised you have TDU up that high"

TDU is a damn amazing game! :)

1)Start off at race, immediately get slammed into wrecks as people try to go through you. No joke, 16 races and I was put into the wall or took immediate major damage within 5 seconds of the start. Really bad.

Isn't that pretty much par for the course with open access, online racing?

"Isn't that pretty much par for the course with open access, online racing?"

Yes, but the damage in this game means that you can fail the race in the first 10 seconds, purely because your car won't move forward anymore. In games without damage, you at least have a chance of recovering from a bad start.

It's like friendly fire in shooters. It's fine in closed environments like a local LAN or a locked WAN game with your friends. Allow the public in, and some douchebag will always run around shooting his team giggling like a 12 year old. Damage on cars has no place in open WAN games.

Isn't that pretty much par for the course with open access, online racing?

Sounds like another case of XBOX live sucks unless you're playing with friends who aren't all d1cks. You know, just like every other game in existence.

That being said, an option to turn damage off for the first 30 seconds of the race (until the fields spreads out a bit) might be warranted.

In theory, one would hope damage would be a disincentive to the corn-holers, because they can't use you as a guard rail without screwing up their own cars. In theory. Also, I prefer longer races than the 3-5 lap sprints, and two reasons for that apply here: first, longer races give one time recover from damage with a pit stop, and secondly, in theory folks won't be as much in a rush to plow through to first place as they will in a 3 lap sprint. In theory.

But yeah, the giggling 12 year old TKer thing can ruin it pretty well very quickly.

Yeah, thats the problem with the car damage....idiots will just plow into you from the rear and you wind up taking damage.....by the second turn of almost every race I had lost precision steering, and then it was just fight the wheel the whole time and try not to fail completely. It was...interesting.

TDU is an amazing game once you dial in the settings and use the wheel, its much more challenging to take a turn in that game at speed than in most racers, you really have to pay attention to the physics. Its not FORZA, but its more challenging than PGR. Too bad its online is so utterly borked.

Grid...I dunno, with the pad from 3rd person its ok, but the cars didn't seem to have much weight....it was a hard situation to describe, you gotta try the demo and see for yourself.

"In theory, one would hope damage would be a disincentive to the corn-holers, because they can't use you as a guard rail without screwing up their own cars."

In theory, yeah. In practice, I can use you as a guard rail and only take soft panel damage, but if in the process I can get you to slam into the wall, you will take performance killing structural damage.

"In theory, one would hope damage would be a disincentive to the corn-holers, because they can't use you as a guard rail without screwing up their own cars."

In theory, yeah. In practice, I can use you as a guard rail and only take soft panel damage, but if in the process I can get you to slam into the wall, you will take performance killing structural damage.

Unfortunately this is the truth. It reminds me a lot of trying to play Live with any racing game though - except in this one there is damage that can literally DNF you. It's frustrating to be in 2nd only to have someone drive into you, forcing you off the track and right into a rail - automatically ending your game.

However, I found this issue to be the same in Gotham.

-JR

I would imagine the full version will give the host an option to turn damage off for online races.