We’re always told to think about the needy at Christmas – quite rightly considering the way we stuff our faces with turkey and spend a fortune on presents. But what about those poor, unfortunate, unfancied videogame equivalents of Tiny Tim?
Beyond the barnstorming
Resistance: Fall of Man and
MotorStorm, and curiosities like
Lair, the majority of the PlayStation 3’s launch games (typically next-gen-ised versions of long-running franchises) are generally held to be unfancied and unloved. So maybe we should spare a thought for them.
You could certainly put
Formula One Championship Edition and
Ridge Racer 7 in that category. I’m a dedicated Formula One follower, but even so, I would never count the first next-gen version of Sony’s officially licensed game (the only official licence now, since EA relinquished its rival claim to the official F1 licence a couple of years ago) as a game which would motivate me to lash out £425 on a PlayStation 3. And as for
Ridge Racer 7, a PS3 take on one of the most venerable and least forward-looking of arcade games…
Gamely, however, Sony opened up its Liverpool studio to a bunch of journalists, so it could show us
Formula One Championship, and also managed to entice a couple of members of Namco’s
Ridge Racer 7 development team over from Japan. Some thoroughly enjoyable hands-on experience ensued, but did anything ensue to convince us of that either of these titles would have any significance? Read on to find out.
Formula One Championship Edition
You have to feel for the team developing a game like
Formula One Championship. How do you differentiate the annual offering from last year’s effort? Once you’ve recreated the Formula One season as realistically as possible, that’s pretty much it – radical shifts in format to revitalise a flagging franchise just aren’t an option.
Graham Ankers,
F1 Championship Edition’s Game Director, described what he sees as
F1CE’s best points: “There will be a full online experience, with up to 11 players head-to-head, the AI will make up the rest of the grid slots, so players will be able to do a late join.
It offers the full next-gen experience, in full HD – one PS2 track took up about 8Mb of memory, whereas on the PS3, Monaco, for example, takes up 80Mb, and on the PS2, all the cars could fit into 5Mb, whereas on the PS3, one car takes up 5Mb.”
Ankers continues: “The simulation has been vastly improved – the physics, car handling and damage. And we’ve created an AI system we call Live Action Racing, which makes the game feel organic. For example, it generates car retirements, but you can also put AI cars under pressure and they will react differently – Michael Schumacher, say, won’t make a mistake, but Takuma Sato probably will.”
Unsurprisingly, given that
Formula One Championship is a PS3 game, the most obvious thing that stands out about it is its graphics, and in particular two visual aspects – an impressive rendition of the view that drivers get in the rain, and a dawn-lighting effect which has been applied to the test tracks.
Ankers says: “The weather is dynamic in the game, so you can go into a race and, as in the real Formula One, it can change mid-way through. We have a full particle system which gives rooster tails off the back of AI cars and reflections of the cars off the track as the surface gets wet. It changes the way you play the game, as you have to be very careful how you position the car. If you’re right behind an AI car with the water coming back at you, your screen will become very obscured, so you need to get out of the slipstream.”
“We’ve set the lighting so all the skies on the tests tracks are at dawn, and we’ve included a new lighting effect which gives you the rays filtering through – volumetric lighting and blooming effects – to give you a powerful impression of the lighting and the shadows. I’ve played the game a lot, and I still like to come into the office and take a classic car out on a test circuit at dawn.”
There are eight unlockable classic F1 cars – “two or three” of which you get for free when you start the game, while the others will arrive when you win a quick race, win a race mode for the first time, get your first pole or win a championship. And that’s pretty much it.
