Back Again to Play Some EA WRC

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Viljami

I have been recently playing some EA WRC (again). I first got into this game when it was first released in the end of last year. It is a very good rally and racing game. Last year also a new Forza Motorsport game was released. There was a sort of a competition going on with these two on which one would be the greatest racing game of the year 2023.

I am playing EA WRC with a game controller. This is the way I have been playing racing and rally games since I first stumbled on Gran Turismo and Colin McRae Rally 1 and 2.0 back in the dominant era of the first Sony PlayStation. I got a wheel and pedals for PS3 in the 2010s but I never truly played racing games with them. Although I did purchase a converter to adapt my PS3 wheel and pedals to PS4. I also got a stand for these. I never had a racing seat. That would have been expensive and I didn’t really get into this so much after all.

I did play recently some Dirt Rally 2.0. That game was released a bit earlier. It was released in 2019. I first got the game for PS4 but I have also it for PC and Xbox Series S/X as a digital copy. If you know anything about the history of Codemasters it is not needed to say that it basically was the rally game company of the 90s and even 2000s . It has brought us some very memorable classics.

There is however another good rally game series that has to be mentioned here. It is the WRC series. It has had the official license of WRC. It has brought us many very good rally games and especially in the recent, say, five or ten years. So there has been a healthy competition. Codemasters hasn’t earlier had the opportunity to make a rally game with a license but now it was the time for that since EA WRC was finally released last year.

We can have some sort of a comparison between Dirt Rally 2.0 and EA WRC. I think these both games have a similar price so this is a good way to think about which one should you get. Which one has the most value out of these two games? The price is actually about 30 euros. I can only tell you how it feels to play these with a controller. Graphics are awesome in both. Music in the background and defnitely while in menus is great also in both. What makes me go to the direction of EA WRC is how the controlling of the car feels.

I find myself constantly spinning or flipping my car around while I play Dirt Rally 2.0. The driving feels realistic and I don’t know if a wheel would actually make the steering more comfortable. So I think this is an issue with playing with a controller. So, EA WRC feels better in this sense. Of course also in the last mentioned some cars like RWD and Group B feel also more difficult to handle.

I have put about 20 hours in these games solely on Xbox Series X. I am more familiar with the older game that is Dirt Rally 2.0. I would think that playing one game more would make it a bit easier in the end but I guess that the experience with game pad only makes the sense in this one. So my conclusion to the question at hand is that I would be rather playing EA WRC if I have to use a controller and not a wheel and pedals.

Okay. I hope that this post once again gave you something. I am trying to write to the blog more often. It has been a while since the latest post. It was nice to write you about my experiences with gaming lately. Have a nice day and I hope to see you again soon.

Some Characteristics of a Realistic Rally Game

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Viljami

Here’s two difficult and also very realistic or so to say simulation type of rally games. The first one I have right here is Richard Burns Rally for PC. It is already a bit old game but it’s also still very popular and liked game. The next one we have right here is a newer, it’s actually from 2019, rally game called Dirt Rally 2.0. The end of the name, two point o, comes from an early rally game called Colin McRae Rally 2.0. I don’t know why they actually decided to add that “point o” to the end originally but I think it sounds and looks nice. CMR 2.0 is one of my all time favorite games and it was released for PlayStation back in the 1990s.

How is it to play a realistic rally game one might ask. They are preferably played with a racing wheel and pedals. I however played these games with a gamepad. Richard Burns Rally is older game so I played it mainly with my Logitech RumblePad 2. I have Dirt Rally 2.0 for PC as a digital edition and I also have this game right in this featured image for PlayStation 4. While it is possible to play these both with a gamepad you have to think about lowering the difficulty. You have to consider turning some driving assists on and adjust the driving skills of your opponents. Both of these games can also be played against real human players through internet or maybe even local area network.

As these games are difficult to play you have to concentrate well to handle the car and to succeed in the progress. These games are not very forgiving ones. There are many differences if you compare a realistic rally game to a fun game like the one I already mentioned – Colin McRae Rally 2.0. The controls are more precise. There is a constant feel of danger. You can easily destroy your good stage time and even, if things go really bad, total your car so you get disqualified from the whole event.

Playing Colin McRae 2.0 is a lot of fun. You drive your car, make mistakes, even bad ones, but you still progress. Playing a game like Dirt Rally 2.0 makes you feel that any mistake you make, even a small one, can be disastrous. There is an appeal to both of these games. They aren’t necessarily a good game and a bad game. I just think they are very different kind of games.

As you may have already found out I am a seasoned racing gamer. My roots as a rally gamer go as deep as the roots of Colin McRae Rally series’s go. I was a fourteen year old kid as I stumbled on CMR. I think this was the moment when my deep interest towards rally gaming started. This game was actually so good that I remember that my good friends older brother that was already almost 30 years old became interested in playing PlayStation and eventually bought one for himself. Don’t ask how is it possible that my friends brother is over ten years older than me and my friend. I don’t have an answer to that question.

There are many racing games that I like and have gotten the opportunity to get into. It might be interesting to go through that list here. First on PlayStation 1 I played Colin McRae Rally 1 and 2, Driver and Gran Turismo. On original Xbox I got into Colin McRae 2005 and Burnout 3: Takedown. Later I played Dirt 3, Need for Speed Shift 1 and 2, F1 2010 and Gran Turismo 5 on PS3 and then I proceeded to PS4 with Dirt 4, Dirt Rally 1 and 2 and Gran Turismo 7. I have played also some titles on Xbox 360 and PC. There are many good racing game titles for PS2 also.

Playing racing games with a gamepad has been the most comfortable format of playing racing games for me. I have later used Xbox One and Xbox Series X gamepads for playing these games on a Windows PC. Windows has a nice support for Xbox gamepads. You can also hook up a PS4 controller very easily using a free app called DS4Windows. You can find it from your favorite search engine very easily. I have also earlier written about DS4Windows on this blog.

If you want to experience a realistic rally game you can spend some money and get yourself a racing wheel and pedals and I also recommend that you get a racing chair also. This can however take up a lot of space from your game room and it also costs you a lot of money. I think you can play racing games with a gamepad and at least get started in this way your journey to the world of racing games.

One good thing about racing games is that you very rarely get to experience a real accident where someone really also gets hurt. This is of course a point on any game. We can take a war game for an example, right?

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.

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.

Intensive Gaming Diary

Tag: dirt rally