Playing Some Dirt 4

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Viljami

I have been playing Dirt 4 a lot lately. I got to admit that I do like it as a rally game. It was released back in 2017. I have it for PS4, as a physical copy and also for PC. I have been playing it on my PC. The featured image is this time a screenshot of the rally of Sweden. I think the game feels better on PC. I am quite satisfied with my PDP controller. I have had some thoughts about buying this new controller that is actually Elite Pad 2. It would cost me something like 130 euros. I am considering still if I am going to buy it or not.

Codemasters is one heck of a rally game maker. There is some worries about what is going to happen now that Electronic Arts bought this game studio. This happened in 2021. Dirt 4 was released before that. There have been many good quality rally games released as games of Codemasters in 2010s. Back in the days when our retro games were newest games that existed Codemasters was delivering a heck of a quality. I got my introduction to rally video games as I played Colin McRae Rallly 2.0. I was actually first playing this and after some time I also just had to get my hands on the first game that was titled Colin McRae Rally.

Back in the 90s there were no serious competition for Codemasters. More recently there has been some competition in the form of a game series WRC. They have actually held the official game badge since they have had the rights to the license so they have been able to claim that they are the official rally game. I like also these new WRC games. I really got into them as late as 2020 when I bought WRC 9 for PC. Lately there have been games like WRC 8 for PS4 and WRC 10 and WRC Generations. I like these titles also.

Codemasters is responsible also of Dirt series. It started witb a game called Colin McRae Dirt and advanced into titles called Colin McRae: Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 and then again Dirt 4 and even Dirt 5, which in my opinion, slightly flopped as a video game. There is also Dirt Rally seiries that currently consists of two games. Dirt Rally games brings us gamers some simulation type of rally racing.

Dirt 4 is still a game you definitely would like to play. It has flashy graphics and even the soundtrack is bouncy. Driving feels somewhat challenging. Maybe not so realistic as in Dirt Rally. I like Dirt 4 a lot. One game that wasn’t mentioned, yet, is Richard Burns Rally. That is also a very good rally game. It is a bit old one but I can still recommend it to you if you don’t mind or if you are a retro fan.

WRC Series (8, 9 and 10)

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Viljami

I don’t remember, at least clearly, why I didn’t get into WRC series earlier. I do remember that one if this game series’s game flopped very badly. This kept me from starting to play a game in this series. It was back in late 2020 when I got my newest PC and I wanted to buy a game for it. So, I read some reviews and soon I was on my way to order a physical copy of WRC 9.

This was my introduction to the series. I am a big fan of Colin McRae Rally games and also racing and rally games in general. Driving games might be my favorite genre of games. I enjoyed WRC 9. It was a good game. Maybe a bit over half of a year after this positive experience I saw WRC 8 for PS4 in my favorite super market that has a section for gaming products. It’s price was about 20 euros. I decided to purchase it. And I wasn’t disappointed.

What about WRC 10? I recently got my Xbox Series X. WRC 10 was actually the second game that I bought for Xbox Series X. I had bought many digital copies of some games but my first and second games were GTA Trilogy and after that WRC 10.

WRC 10 had received some bad reviews. Finnish Gamereactor gave it 5/10. This score made me really consider about my purchase seriously. I find Gamereactor to usually be a realiable source when I think about buying a new game. Some other reviews, I am not right now mentioning these two blogs names, said, actually something like, “this game isn’t perfect but if you are a true rally game fan, you should definitely buy it”.

One other factor that made think about not to buy WRC 10 was that I already know that there is a new game, WRC Generation, going to be released soon. After all I went and bought WRC 10. I thought that since it was available and I would have at least some weeks to play it before starting to plan on playing WRC Generations I made this decision. Also the price was in my opinion right. I only had to pay about 35 euros for this game.

Just yesterday I got my WRC 10 from mail. The installation process was a bit slow, but it is the same with every new game. They seem to take up some space and more than some years earlier. So the process of installing a game today can take a long time. I have played it only for like two or three hours. At this moment it seems to be a good and solid rally game. I have to adjust my driving style for this game since I have played recently a lot of Forza Motorsport 3. I think WRC 10 is more of a simulation game than FM3.

There are some comments on those reviews that I wrote above. The driving seems more comfortable if you have a wheel and pedals. It might be more difficult to play with a game pad. I can say that graphics, being 4K and displayed from a 4K screen, are absolutely amazing. And you must also consider that this game has a license so you are going to experience all real cars, drivers and teams. Also, this license is going next year (2023) to Codemasters so we are also waiting for a rally game from them.

I really have to get more into WRC 10 and soon. As I am an adult and I have responsibilities, I don’t have all day every day, twenty-four-seven three-six-five for gaming, you know? To summarize, I have some experience of latest games in WRC series and I can recommend them. Especially if you are a rally game fan.

Waiting for Forza Motorsport 8

Posted on April 28, 2022 by Viljami

Forza Horizon 5 was released in the fall of last year. I didn’t pick it up for some reason. Maybe I was so much into playing Diablo II Resurrected and Call of Duty – Vanguard. And to speak about it I’m not really such a fan of Forza Horizon series. I have to say that I am more into Forza Motorsport.

So there’s a new Forza Motorsport getting released soon. It is speculated that se might see it in the end of this year. However the final release date hasn’t been told. I have some knowledge of the first and also of the third game of this racing series. Actually, as you have probably seen from this posts featured image, I picked up, again, Forza Motorsport 3 and started playing it.

It is a very nice game. The graphics are a bit rude as you compare them to later games like Gran Turismo 7 on PS4. You have to consider how old Xbox 360 really is. It was released already in 2005. So we cannot compare it directly to these newer consoles. But if you put graphics aside you will find this game to be a nice and very playable. I am somewhat familiar also to the first Forza Motorsport game that was released in 2005. I don’t currently own a working original Xbox but you can however play this game with Xbox 360 because it has a backwards compatibility. Every original Xbox title doesn’t however work. I usually check a list from Wikipedia to see if a game is compatible. You can find it fast from your favorite search engine if you are interested.

I really like racing games. You might have noticed this. I first got into Gran Turismo and it was my first really realistic racing game. I played it a lot. Later I picked up some other racing games. At a time I had a keen interest in Need for Speed Shift one and two that I played with my PS3. That was maybe in 2010 or 2011. Back then I didn’t play so much retro games. And now, some years later, I found Gran Turismo again. I really didn’t like Gran Turismo 5. And of course I have to mention Colin McRae Rally series that progressed to Dirt series later. I think Dirt 3 and 4 were really good. I have some history also in Dirt Rally 1 and 2.0. Who doesn’t remember Richard Burns Rally? You have to really try it although it is already a bit old racing game.

So here we are. We are waiting for the next game in a series of racing games released for Xbox consoles. I think I will have some space left in my Xbox Series S for the new Forza Motorsport 8. I don’t know who won the race of these racing games. It is obvious that there is a competition between Xbox and PlayStation. I kind of finished Gran Turismo 7. I played it for about 40 hours. As there is some time I have to think if I should try finishing the third Forza Motorsport game. I have also played a bit Flatout 2 whic was develop by Bugbear which is a Finnish game company. You might want to check a game called Rally Trophy. I end this post by saying that Gran Turismo 4 was also a really good racing game.

The legacy of Colin McRae Rally

Posted on July 1, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

Now that Dirt 5 is coming to us later this year it would be nice to think about how Codemasters started this whole rally game thing. So it was 1998 and PS1 was the best and most popular gaming system out there. We had already seen some really good racing games. Gran Turismo was released early in 1998. The first Colin McRae Rally game was good, but in my opinion, the second game was even better. It had some awesome physics modeling that made it the most realistic rally game of its time. Back then racing games were mainly played with gamepad instead of a wheel and pedals. This made playing not so realistic but also really fun and it also demanded a good concentrating.

Two first games were popular. Third game, Colin McRae Rally 3, was released on the next generation of gaming consoles. It was released for PC, PS2 and original Xbox. I really liked this game also. Graphics are better than in the first two games but the feeling and controlling is very much like in these first two games. Colin McRae Rally 04 and Colin McRae Rally 2005 followed some years after. It tells a lot about this games popularity that there were so many games released. It actually had competitors. One really good simulation rally game was Richard Burns Rally. Some players thought that Colin McRae games weren’t actually the most realistic racing games that existed. That was about to change. But it took several years for Codemasters to develop its most realistic rally simulation game yet. I am talking about new games that were released to PS4.

Dirt series started with Colin McRae DiRT. It brought nice rally driving experience along with some other kinds of vehicles for players to drive with. It was a good racing game. It was followed by Colin McRae Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 that were both released, also with the Dirt series’s first game, on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I talked about how Codemasters were also beginning to develop a racing game that would be more realistic. The game, which also has a sequel, was Dirt Rally. It was released for PS4 along with PC and Xbox One. It brought realistic driving experience to players that could even use wheel and pedals to play this racing simulation.

Surely there are many racing games and even series’s of racing games. Colin McRae Rally is still very important to me and close to my hearth. It introduced me to rally games. I also played other racing games, but not really any other rally games. With Dirt Rally 2.0 and Dirt 4 released already some years ago rally game fans will know where they are turning their heads to as they need some more rally gaming experinces. The saga continues as Dirt 5 will be released later this year.

Intensive Gaming Diary

Tag: colin mcrae rally