The car models in the game, in my opinion, suck. One other thing to note is that you cannot change teams in Championship, thus you can’t run your own little storyline about Ralf Schumacher breaking his legs and you, the young and talented rookie being bought up by Williams and led to your first Grand Prix win, midseason!Īfter my unfortunate experiences with Driving School in last years game, I haven’t even bothered to load it up yet. Sure, you lose a couple of wheels, occasionally a wing, and yes, they do now bounce around like they should on the track, but that’s about the extent to which damage is possible in the game – massive accidents usually result in you flying about 70 feet in the air, spinning feverously for 5 minutes before landing, usually still with at least 1 wheel and 1 wing. Although this was highly entertaining, it did make me realize how absolutely awful the F1 2002 crashes are.
COOL! The most amazing part was that it WASN’T caused by me! Drivers weave around, clip each others wings off, flip over each other and, in this case, take me out. I qualified in 15th place at Australia (where I’m amazing) and was taken out by a massive accident on the first turn. I started a championship at 107% competitor ability in an Arrows. Playing in Test Day can be entertaining though – it allows you to play with setups and try the best possible time, and honestly, it’s where I’ve spent most of my time in the game so far. The only way to have a fun race with anyone else is over a LAN with absolutely no latency, otherwise, good luck. It took me about as long to realize that internet multiplayer SUCKS in F1 2002. As we accelerated into the first turn, I was amazed that the person in front of me should be able to stay on the road, after all he was oscillating between each side of the track ( ) about 40 times per second. When we finally when to the race, before the lights even went out I was shoved from some idiot behind who decided that green lights were synonymous with red lights – which promptly gave me a stop and go penalty even although I had yet to touch the accelerator. To our surprise, after about 10 minutes in qualifying we had about 7 other opponents. The first time I loaded up multiplayer, my friend created a game so that we could meet up and try it out – we did a couple of laps of qualifying, which were, to say the least, severely interrupted by people joining (every time someone joins your computer “locks up” for about 5 seconds). A race with more than 1 other opponent on a connection of anything less than Cable/ADSL is almost unplayable – and this is coming from someone with 512 guaranteed ADSL. So why is this a critical review?ĭon’t even bother with multiplayer.
I have to hand it to EA though, the game is a lot more playable if you know where to break and how to do it – racing with my 360 Modena Pro steering wheel (hey, it was the only one I could find, it’s not my fault it’s got the ugly Ferrari logo on it) in a BAR through Canada actually looked somewhat comparable.
I had played the demo of the game, and it seemed much more promising, albeit when not running winamp or any form of anti-virus at the same time (on a p4 1.8ghz, 512mb RAM, GeForce3 64mb), and also without using the pathetic automatic breaking system, oh and using less cars on the grid also seemed to help I loaded it up eagerly – could this be it? The F1 game that would revolutionize the slow-crawling industry? Then I remember it was made by EA, and my hopes were dashed before I even got to the big ugly splash screen.