Something my mate wrote (if you're looking Si, I am sorry. But it is hilarious)
"I feared a rehash of Grid - a well-produced presentation with plenty of ideas but a vacuous racing experience, or something more suited to an arcade style of handling. I never imagined that F1 2010 would be almost totally inverse to Grid. The central driving mechanic is actually quite good but the game is so much more like an arcade game than we realise...
It's as if the programmers stopped reading about F1 or playing anteceding F1 games and just watched the races on TV.
Presentation:
* Big bold UI and that's ok - it's distinct from the familiar FOM house style but maybe that's for a reason...
* Menus are a clutter.
* The backstage environment suited Dirt2 well because it implied that you were part of a circus, part of something special. Meanwhile, my motorhome is a sparse office in the car park where a woman occasionally looks up from her laptop just to despise me even more. (maybe this changes as you progress?)
* I imagine the vocal requirements were captured late, almost certainly in one take and presumably wrapped up in good time to catch last orders at the pub. David Croft and Holly Samos emerge with little credit (the latter probably confused by not being able to interview "AndyFromBridgestone" and "I'mWithChristianHorner"
and as for the Poundland Rob Smedley... ugh.
Pitlane
Ah man, your description of the pitlane is perfect - a wormhole it is, and those changes of direction...
Wing Mirrors
Out-board mirrors are just stupid, but the concave distortion is equally useless.
Sector 3
...does not exist, according to my timing monitor, maybe I went through that wormhole. Put the timing beam on the finish line too (this one is a pet hate of mine from real F1)
My favourite bug (so far) - Singapore.
Present favourite is the armco 'protrusion' on the right just before you drive onto the Anderson Bridge, it actually stops your car dead in its tracks. First time it happened I didn't know whether to laugh or propel myself forward into the desk with sympathetic whiplash.
-- -- -- --
EGO - Intelligently Artificial
I had a number of points to make but I believe many of them are related to Codemasters' Ego technology.
Starting with the instant replay mode - that short buffer suits the flashback gimmick but for replay purposes it needs to be longer, the virtual cameras swoop and shake impressively but they're also poorly located and triggered. Then there is the inability to select and view other cars.
Well, why should we?
It wasn't necessary with the Dirt games, nor was it so with Grid (no qualifying, for one thing) so why now? Because we're nosey, that's why. One of the pleasures of the Crammond-era games was the ability to study the opposition and your own performance, back in 1992 I must have lost hours watching AI run laps in qualifying.
Not that it matters because apparently the AI aren't running laps, it's just a generated time. I've seen posts in other places suggesting that the lap-times in the race are ersatz too - and that's just the cars directly in front of you. I don't have any experience of that yet but I have noticed the inconsistency of the leader's lap times which can fluctuate by seconds, not tenths, depending on how fast you are. Of course, lap times aren't recorded at the end of the race so who knows.
One thing I did notice though, I was told "Liuzzi was five seconds ahead" - was that the guy I just passed or is his brother Nigel further up the road? When was he five seconds in front of me, and where did I make this time up? I've since turned the position indicator off because of the LIES.
So if the numbers are fake it makes sense to fudge the positional chart with leader-relative (lap-time) difference as opposed to relative gaps, and because of such fakery there's no point providing FOM graphics either - no conventional gaps or times to work from.
It's a numbers game, you're racing 23 equations around the world and their sums don't add up.
So it's adaptive AI then, I don't think that's a bad thing but at least give us the option to turn it off or scale it (as with the Papyrus 'NASCAR' series). On track the AI movement can be... interesting. First time I noticed this I thought Petrov had found a snake in his cockpit, so alarming was his swerve. Still, I don't necessarily mind that.
The flag rules are almost always detrimental to the player, so they had to be turned down. I gather that turning Fuel simulation off helps with regard to quali/race times disparity (only the player is affected), maybe the same is true of tyre wear? For now, I'm restarting career mode with fuel sim off.
Hate to say it but, with the next game presumably less than 12 months away from mastering, I can't see some of the issues specific to AI transparency being resolved with this game engine.
-- -- -- --
I'm probably going to stick with it because the actual driving is a positive (and those career achievements aren't going to earn themselves). It's a shame that points such as those above blight this game because once you're sitting in the car, in the midst of a race, it starts to feel like that 8/10 claimed breathlessly by early reviews. Our 23 flexible friends often defy logic (and possibly the theory of relativity) but they're on track to give you a race and something to aim for.
That's why F1 2010 really is an arcade game, not 'arcade-style' - it's a coin-op; it is Winning Run, Virtua Racing, Sega Rally even. It's satisfying to play and drive - just don't ask too many questions about how the AI get to perform as they do...
I guess that's my way of saying that I'm happy to be playing an F1 game again, but oh man, what were they thinking?"