Be Excellent To Each Other

Dirt 3 looks to be shaping up quite well:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011- ... -interview

I rather enjoyed the first two despite all the truck racing and other bollocks but this one looks like a step in the right direction.

DiRT2 is fantastic on the PC (the 360 version of DiRT gave me a headache), so I'll be all over this like a cheap suit.

Multiplayer hi-jinks abound. (The truck racing is really good fun in DiRT2 with friends, sucks a bit single player though.)

Hopefully in single player it will still have nice easy settings for driving game folks like me who think all corners should be drifted around

That does sound interesting. I've avoided the DiRT series precisely because of all the non-rally bollocks strapped onto it. It always looked like it was trying to do too much at once, and suffering for it; trying to get the mechanics of so many different race and vehicle types leaves a master of none approach and just misses the mark.

I'll keep an eye on it.

DiRT was pretty good, so I have high hopes for this

It does amuse me when you get "experts" commenting on realism in games. I think unless they are a gamer in the first place, it is too easy to be swayed by the graphics and general wow factor of modern games, I take any expert opinion on realism with a pinch of salt...
"It's so realistic, the graphics are amazing!"

What they failed to take into account was that there's plenty of off-roading games (MX vs ATV is my favourite) that have all the buggies, ATVs, trucks and such that you could ever want to crash into rocks, and that DiRT was always about Colin McRae and rallying. I don't mind the X-Games BS in MX vs ATV (though it doesn't feature DiRT 2's smacktalk) because it's the right context for it. Taking a rally game and putting Travis Pastrami and his bros in fails.

Reading on, they haven't actually removed all that crap from the game, merely reduced the amount of it. There's still only 60% of the game as rallying, which is still 40% less than it should be in a game with a rallying past.

I really, really want a good rally game. How was that WRC one released last year? It's yet to arrive from LoveFilm.

The thing is that games are so good these days that there's plenty of "experts" who actually are qualified to comment on the realism of racing games. A huge number of competitive drivers these days are also into racing games.

WRC2010, like all Milestone games of late, was pretty good but not amazing. If you're a fan of the type of racing in question (touring cars, superbikes or rallying) then you'll probably have a great time but they lack the mass-market appeal of something like DiRT or GRiD.

I think myp has it. I never got around to it, I enjoyed the demo but was greatly put off by the whiny co-driver.

It'll arrive here eventually, so I'm not in any hurry. Good to hear it isn't totally shite, though, and I'm definitely after a 'pure' game rather than a mish-mash of shite.

I wasn't keen on the demo, it seemed nasty and unfinished and the handling felt fairly horrible, it was only a quick go I had, though and it actually reviewed quite well, sort of 7/10 I think.

Yes, that was my point, if they are also gamers then all well and good. Experts who start their comment on realism by saying "The graphics are amazing" as in the video on that interview make my head itch.

It's on my shelf, but I haven't been arsed to set up my wheel for a while so it's gone unplayed so far.

Trying to think back to the demo, there was a realism setting or other that you had to turn on to make the handling interesting.

Race Pro next week I was thinking we should get others involved so it's a bit more fun than just the two of us.

I'll be busy playing (not yet determined at time of going to press), sorry.

Best bit of Dirt 1 & 2 was the rallycross. As I doubt anyone would be crazy enough to do a solely rallycross game, I hope it stays.Along with hill-climbs. And there better be gymkhana, so we can pretend to be Ken Block.

I'll give you a fucking headache you fucking PC spod.



The difficulty on DiRT(ybitch)2 was great for me in that I knocked it down when playing with the wheel and it still represented a decent enough challenge and you couldn't abuse the rewind feature too much.

I want to go back and play it again now as I did my usual and stopped to play the next thing that came along.

We can do, but we already have to race 200 events for just the both of us.

This reviewed well; 9/10 from Eurogamer and 88% on Metacritic:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dirt-3
http://www.metacritic.com/publication/e ... lter=games

£30 in Morrisons: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dirt-3- ... day/944434

I saw an advert for this the other day, can I drive around virtual London with it? or is there just a course set in Battersea Power Station?

Malc

Tempted, I loved the Colin McRae games back in the day, and didn't mind DiRT 2. Good to see they have dialled back on the USA!!!!! element.
I'll most likely get it cheap on the PS3 at some point, as that is where I have my best wheel, and this seems like more of a wheel game than the last installment.

I've got WRC unplayed at the moment (looking forward to getting some time to try it) - no interest in this whatsoever.

Been playing this a fair bit for the last week or two. It's good, in that the actual sensation of speed and being on the edge of flying off into the trees is all present and correct whilst it still remains accessible enough. However it still feels nothing like a rally game. The rally stages are short, so short you can memorise them after a couple of runs rather than so long that you have to rely on the pace notes and your wits to get through. Also they only seem to be about a third of the game, the rest being fucking truck racing, Kenneth Bastarding Block's Skidding Around A Car Park Contest and "that was insane, you should upload that footage to yootoob".

This game engine married to a proper rally game would be glorious, though.

Some of the online multiplayer modes are genius, cat and mouse in particular.

I've played out the single player mode and by the end of it was pretty handy at the Gymkhana stuff and really rather enjoying it too.

The trucks and buggies are quite good fun IMO, if not exactly pure rallying. Personally I love the Rallycross events.

If you just want 'straight' rallying action, your best bet is to get online.

It's logged over 24 hours of play time for me according to Steam, so there's lots to do in there.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's shit or anything it's just that reviews had lead me to believe that it was returning more towards its Colin McRae roots and less of the extreme bollocks. But it was all lies. I don't really hate the truck racing or even the gymkhana stuff but it's not what I was wanting to play. I guess the wait for a semi-decent modern rally game goes on.

Fair enough, pure rallying makes up a pretty small part of the game, and all the rally stages are, as you say, very short.

Then again, the original Colin McRae games were somewhat punishing in places, I'm really not sure I'd have the patience or the endurance for them these days - my free games time isn't what it was in 1998