Intensive Gaming Diary

Blog about different aspects of retro and new video games.

Tag: mcrae

Playing Some Dirt 4

Posted on 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.

I Don’t Mind That a Game Is a Bit Old

Posted on by Viljami

Sometimes I don’t realize how fast time keeps moving. If you consider that Colin McRae Dirt 2 was released thirteen years ago you probably get my point. In my opinion this rally game has aged beatifully. It is still a very good game. Maybe not the best of this series but you have to consider the quality of the games that you compare it to.

As you might think already I started going through all these games that I haven’t had enough time to try to complete. It is nice to understand that when you spend some time playing a game it kind of reveals itself and you can really get into the game you are playing. It takes time, doesn’t it.

Colin McRae Dirt 2 has a specific style of driving that you’ll have to adapt to. It isn’t a simulator racing game. Driving in this game differs a bit from some other racing games that I have recently played so it takes some time to adjust to it. It isn’t so difficult after all. You can also in this game adjust the difficulty level if you find driving too easy or even too hard.

There’s lots of visual detail in this rally game. You get to know some actual persons that are driving the vehicles. As you have probably figured you get to drive rally cars and you also have many more types of cars that you have to drive. I think that’s where the “dirt” in the games name comes from.

Some other racing games that I have recently played are, of course, Burnout 3 Takedown, WRC 10 and Forza Motorsport 6. If we compare this game to these other racing games I can say that Colin McRae Dirt 2 offers a very good, maybe a bit easy, experience for the player. There is a challenge also if you adjust the difficulty. You can also set damage on or completely off. It is common, at least for me as I drive these driving games aggressively, to bump in to another racer.

Colin McRae Dirt 2 is one of those games that I have thought about playing for a long time. As other Dirt / Colin McRae rally game titles are very familiar to me I like this game. I still have a lot to play. I am hoping to complete this game and it looks good so far. I have now put six hours to playing this game.

Some Good and Recently Released Rally Games

Posted on by Viljami

I started playing WRC 9 at end of last year. So it was December 2020. I had just got a new PC. This was the first game I bought. I had heard about some earlier WRC games. Let me say that this is definitely a series of games and not only one game. But I heard that one game in this series is very bad and you should not buy it. I thought that maybe it was only one bad game. You shouldn’t judge the whole series with one game.

So I read a review of WRC 9 as players often do before they buy a game. WRC 9 received a good grade. I think it was 8 out of 10. So I decided to buy it. It was a good decision. I really enjoyed the game.

I had earlier already played Dirt Rally 2.0. I was very excited about it when it was released back in 2019. I bought it just some days after it was released. I was confident that it would offer me good time. It promised to bring you a good driving experience even if you play, as I do, with only game pad instead of a driving wheel and pedals. I don’t play with wheel and pedals. I haven’t really ever got in to it. It would be a more realistic experience but I just can’t seem to learn so much of it for me to make the transition. I have actually played with game pad since I first started playing the first Gran Turismo and a bit after it Colin McRae Rally 2.0.

The latest rally game I purchased was WRC 8 for PS4. I found it in sale from a supermarket. It’s nowadays somewhat rare to find games from super markets but I made a find. It’s price was about half the price it was originally. I found it to be a very good rally game also.

So these are some latest rally games that I’ve played. They all offer a certain and good feel of driving. WRC 8 and 9 are a bit more playable and Dirt Rally 2.0 offfers a bit more realistic feel. Of course you can tweak the settings and make the game more difficult if you wish to. I am not going in to detail with this post. Dirt Rally 2.0 is designed by Codemasters. WRC is a bit younger series of rally games. Codemasters has delivered us some very good titles in the history of rally games. You probably remember Colin McRae Rally. I wrote recently about it and…you probably guessed it…it is my alltime favorite game.

So if you are looking for a good rally game here are some recommendations. We didn’t get so deep in this text. I just don’t really know how to approach this subject. I can see how developers’s algortithms work in here. At least I can figure out how the feel of driving is getting simulated. So basically your computer reads what buttons you press in which time and defines where your car is positioned and so on…it’s very complex. But my knowledge as a programmer and player, also, bring me to the point where I can actually see what goes on under the hood so to say.

All of these games are definitely more like driving simulations instead of arcade driving games that have more play ability inside. If you want to know more about games like these keep following me and you can definitely have some experience of driving a real racing or rally car. It would definitely help you. I really think there is no right or wrong. This is just some of my thinking. And…I believe the main designer that was behind the first Dirt Rally was a real expert in his field. He had a deep knowledge of games and cars.

Studying Physics in Colin Mc Rae Rally 2.0

Posted on by Viljami

Colin Mc Rae Rally 2.0 is a very interesting game in many ways. I wrote recently about different strategies you can have in this game. Now I would like to return to the physics and how this part of the game is handled. I think this game was the first rally game and also among some first racing games that I really liked (Gran Turismo was also great) and got into. It was released for PC and PS1. I played both of them.

There is no doubt that the way CMR 2.0 handles the part of physical modeling was in its time revolutionary. I know lots about games but I also have studied a bit of physics. I have learned physics mainly through school and by studying it in a school of applied sciences. However I am not a physicist. I am more of a software designer. So I know about some coding stuff also. This might open this fact a bit of how I find thinking about these subjects extremely interesting.

I haven’t seen any source code from this game. This is a commercial game and its code isn’t open source. I think for many of the fans of this game this doesn’t come as a surprise. The game was hugely popular. Releasing it as a freeware would be, well, stupid, you might say. However there are some very interesting details that open up for me as I play this rally game.

Let’s think about friction. It deals with surfaces. In a car you can have different tires that behave differently on different surfaces of road. So this is one thing. While driving on icy or snowy road you might want to use chains with tires. While driving on tarmac you want to use soft tires. And on wet surface you use special tires that perform nice on for example wet tarmac. Same goes for muddy surfaces or roads that are of gravel. You have to have a good grip on the road you are driving and friction can give you this.

There is a force that is effective on any road that you can drive on the whole planet Earth. It is called gravity. You have to have good and sufficient suspension in your car. On roads that are bumpy you have to have more suspension for overcoming the differences of altitude. Too much suspension is not good either if you drive on flat road.

You can also break and accelerate. You turn the wheel in right direction at a right time. The key is to try to steer correctly or at least keep the car moving as fast as possible. If you don’t break at a correct time you get to grass or some other surface that slows you down. Crashing also slows you down. This has everything to do with a thing called momentum. If an object doesn’t receive any push to any direction it keeps moving with the speed it has to the direction it is moving. At different time there is different amount of push to the vehicle. If nothing gets pushed the car keeps moving. Bigger objects take more power to get moving and are slower to stop moving. So the more mass you have the slower you are.

I think this is enough physics. I repeat what I said earlier. This is not so precise of a study. I haven’t seen any source code and I didn’t describe my theory so thoroughly. I hope this motivates you to learn more about physics. You can find more information using your favorite search engine. I definitely feel that you will get more excited about this particular rally game.

Thinking About Strategy in Colin McRae Rally 2.0

Posted on by Viljami

There are basically two ways to think about your car settings in Colin McRae Rally 2.0. You can concentrate on driving and copy the best settings from a strategy guide (which is actually available through internet for free) or you can actually test your car with different settings and change them to your own liking. Testing your car to find a good setting can take time. In this text I would like to describe how these settings take impact on your car in this game. I will tell you what each setting will do. So let’s get to it!

There are different settings in this game for tires. Basically you have slick tires that are good for stages that are mainly driven on tarmac. Spikes are good for ice. There are also settings for wet and dry mud and wet and dry gravel. So yo have to choose your tires based on how the surface of the road is. This is pretty simple. You just choose a right tires for each type of road surface.

There are however some settings that aren’t so clear on what they have effect on. Well, actually “gearbox” isn’t so complicated. You can set your acceleration to maximum level but then you loose some top speed. And you can also set your top speed to maximum and you will lose some acceleration. Good acceleration is nice for stages that have many corners and high top speed is better on stages that have long straight parts. That makes sense doesn’t it.

“Suspension” can be adjusted to soft setting on stages that are bumpy or that have many jumps. When driving on flat stages and also stages that have tarmac on their road it is recommended to adjust suspension to hard. You can also adjust your breaks and power of your car to have a tendency to under or over steer. And finally the last setting you have to worry about, that is called “Steering” tells you how sensitively you can steer your car. It can react fast or it can react a bit slower to how you turn your driving wheel (or press the buttons if you are playing this game with a game pad).

If you don’t like to fiddle with the settings and you want to just drive here’s a link to the strategy guide of Colin McRae Rally 2.0.

The legacy of Colin McRae Rally

Posted on 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.

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