Be Excellent To Each Other

If anyone remembers Codemasters' Race Driver GRID from a few years back, it was a fun semi arcadey racer with not many cars, but some great tracks and really good gameplay. There was no car tuning or setup whatsoever, so everyone had identical cars which made for very close online racing. The touring car racing was particularly popular and it had demolition derby too.

GRID 2 came out last year. Unfortunately, Codemasters completely missed the point and it was a horrible gimmicky arcade racer with weird handling and messy DLC. Nobody liked it.

Thankfully Codemasters took on board the avalanche of negative comments and rejigged it into a proper racing game with decent handling. GRID Autosport is out on the 27th June for PC and last gen consoles.
It's got touring cars! It's got demolition derby! There's also GT cars and open wheelers. There's also some great tracks including Spa Francorchamps, Bathurst Mount Panorama and Brands Hatch.

Here's a video



More info on the forum.
GRID Forum

Thanks for the edit Grim. I was just trying to work out how to get the video to embed properly.

After the shitfest of Grid 2 I'll be buggered if I'm buying this for full price at launch. One to snap up in a Steam sale I think.

Yeah, I've read a bit about this one before. It sounds promising, although I never quite liked the handling in GRID.

Did you actually buy GRID 2? Was it really as bad as I think it was?

GRID 2 was alright, the handling was better than GRID but the actual game was much worse.

Yuck yuck yuck. These games are massive turds.

Yeah I bought it at launch on Steam (or even pre-ordered it, can't quite recall).

The amazing graphics can't salvage the game by a long chalk, stupid drifting around crap tracks with endless 90 degree corners and suchlike. The 'story' was really annoying too, except I can't remember why. (That's how much of an impression it made.)

IIRC I plugged my way about 30% through the one player campaign before giving up on it as a bad job, a couple of mates did the same. I gave it a rest for a couple of weeks at one point, and then went back to it wondering why I'd thought it was rubbish and it immediately all came back to me. Got uninstalled a couple of months later never to be installed again.

Agreed the handling in GRID wasn't necessarily what you'd expect, but it rewarded good driving and I found it a lot of fun. It was never meant to be a sim though, neither was it 100% arcade.

The handling model in Autosport is different from both GRID and GRID 2 and it sounds like they've put a lot of work in to appease people who actually like driving games. All the feedback from the beta versions seems positive, even from hardcore racing sim people who universally agreed GRID 2 was a massive pile of turd.

Yeah, I'll definitely keep an eye on it. Still waiting for the proper rally game from Codemasters that has been rumoured. Hopefully it won't be based exclusively on the modern, boring shitty little hatchback era.

And it better not have Ken fucking Block skidding around in a car park in a fucking Ford Fiesta either.

There'll never be another rally game as good as Richard Burns Rally. It's all about online racing for me, so I never bothered with any rally games since the original DIRT.

The WRC games are probably the best you'll get rally sim-wise, these days, but they are a bit dry.

The first two Mcrae games were the peak for me. Never really got into a rally game after that.

Last Rally game I played was Sega Rally on 360. It was a bit pap.

Ha!

I got talked into buying this by one of the chaps last week - (in all fairness I'm completely off shooters at the moment and haven't been playing BF4 in our usual Saturday night slot, so he was after something that we'd all play together, and suggested Grid Autosport) - so here is REPORTAGE.

SINGLE PLAYER MODE seems alright, it's a massively better game than Grid 2 although that isn't really saying much, but after the amazements of Mario Kart 8 it all seems rather sterile and flat to me (literally flat, all racers should have anti-grav sections!). I may work may through it in small chunks, and if you like traditional racers on normal tracks across a variety of different disciplines then there's a lot to go at here for sure. (A couple of mates are all over it and love it to pieces, but then again they scoff at Mario Kart and my current Nintendo infatuation, so it's probably down to the sort of thing you like.)

MULTIPLAYER MODE was dish of the day last night and we had an absolute riot with it (easily managing to play for the best part of three hours). Whilst the single player mode follows the traditional path of starting off in crap cars and working your way up, multiplayer appears to make everything available right from the off, so we had a bash in everything from Focus Touring Cars right up to some insane special edition Bugatti Veyrons. We'd also all forgotten how arse-happy Lancia Delta Integrales are

Best races of the evening were probably on the Brands Hatch short circuit, (real nip and tuck stuff), but we had some great fun on a couple of tracks out in Dubai, and many others I can't remember. One of my mates was hosting so I didn't see the options he was seeing, we did have a race in some sort of insane souped-up classic Minis though, which appeared to be capable of speeds of 125mph. Lots of different game modes going on too, not just standard grid start races. (There's a rolling start eliminator sort of affair, for example.)

Finished off the evening with some Demolition Derby which was a hoot.

So yeah, very enjoyable game. I was a bit grizzly at having spent £30 on it and not getting on terribly well with the single player career mode, but after last night we all agreed the game will have some proper legs in it for our Saturday night slot, which is cool.

Graphically it's luscious but I'm not sure it looks substantially better than racers have been doing for years now, I can HIGH it out at 2560x1440@60FPS with v-sync on, all ULTRA-ed out it chokes a bit sometimes when I don't want it to, but then again my PC is cracking on a bit now and I'm sure a more capable machine could power through that restriction.

There's a high-res texture pack as free DLC, budget another 5GB of space for that.

Works out of the box with an XBox 360 pad, also with the XBox One pad, which is what one of the chaps was using.

In party/game VOIP but we were using our own Teamspeak server so can't comment on that.

Needs a Codemaster Racenet account and logging into their service, (but it does integrate with Steam for friends invites and such), so fuck knows how long they'll keep that running for..... DiRT2 and DiRT3 have been left permanently broken since MS turned off Games For Windows Live.

Oh yes, no excitable Americans say anything at any point, as far as we can tell.....

Overall - great fun!

Told you! Got it for 360 on launch day. I like it.

Honestly can't see me putting a huge amount of time into the single player career mode, (at least whilst I've got Nintendo games on the go), but yeah, as a multiplayer game it really ticked the boxes for us last night.

We very quickly moved to visual damage only though, as it was obvious real damage was going to cause some ructions.....

I've played a bit of career to learn the tracks and get used to the cars. The AI are very dirty. It'll be online only for me once I've got into it.

We had another great session with this on Saturday, had six of us playing and looks like we'll have a seventh for this week

There were a few cross words during the races when we were running with damage and collisions on, but most races were just visual damage only, and we had a few with collisions off completely to silence those who were objecting most strongly to what they perceived to be ungentlemanly conduct. (Smashed up cars missing wheels and doors became quite a common sight at one point.)

Then again towards the end of the evening we had a few races on the Brands Hatch Indy Circuit that descended into highly improper carnage, with even the self-appointed maintainers of standards not above what can only be described as 'enthusiastic jostling' for position on the track.

We've got a Manx Racenet Club thing on the go, albeit I keep forgetting to join the bloody thing.....

Since the PS4 has yet to deliver any driving games worth bothering with I just ordered this for my PS3. Might have to the Touring Car Legends add on too.

Played a good bit of this last night. It's great, it's basically TOCA but all modern and shiny like, reminds me a bit of the mighty RacePro too, which for my money is still the greatest console racer.

I like the other driver AI, they do react to you although as Mr Burrrt has pointed out they also have a bit of a tendency to just take their line regardless of the fact that you might be well alongside them, but apart from that they put up a decent fight. Had a quick go in some of the open wheelers and they're good but I didn't get the same sense of feedback, the grip seemed a bit all or nothing without the feeling of tiptoeing on the edge of adhesion that I got from the ones in RacePro.

8.5/10 so far though, it's tempting me to drag my wheel down from the loft.

Still playing it. Online touring cars exclusively. The playlist has got a bit stale though as there aren't that many tracks in it (plenty in the whole game though). PC players seem to have got the best deal with this game as they are promised a rear view mirror and a 400% increase in the number of tracks in each playlist. Codemasters have made a few screw ups with this game which they take ages to produce console patches for. PS3 version is OK now I think, but 360 version is now plagued with random disconnections from lobbies and freezing. Console players won't get a rear view mirror as the processor overhead to accommodate it is taken up by eye candy like aircraft flying over, balloons being released, waving flags and crowds of idiots gurning in the pit lane.

CM claim that consoles won't get the expanded track rotation because there isn't the memory to accommodate it. Can't see this myself as I would think it would be only 2 tiny bits of data for each combo - track and car type. Anyone know anything about console programming able to shed any light on this?