Reply To: What do we think about the game?

[Tijn]

#305

As for me, the game is pretty much how I remember it from back when I played it as a kid. The game is rather basic, but offers just enough variety to keep you busy for a while. Main difference between now and back then, is that I always used to play on the easiest difficulty, where as now it’s quite the opposite and I’m always playing on level 5. I suppose these 25 years weren’t for nothing, as I’ve acquired some racing skills which I was lacking back then, hehe 😛

At first I was enjoying doing championships quite a bit. It’s not that easy to get yourself through qualifying and a race without hurting yourself, so that’s a nice challenge. Winning a championship doesn’t mean you have to win all races. In fact, you don’t have to win any races, as long as you score more points than anyone else in the end. Combined with the save/load feature, it’s quite doable, even though it can be quite challenging at first to make sure you don’t crash out, because a single contact with another car will mean the end of the race.

After a while, you start to notice however that the AI isn’t actually that good. Once you know a track by heart, it’s not that hard to get a pole position. And once you start on the first row of the grid, a race win is almost guaranteed. So after a while, racing the AI gets old and loses its appeal, because the fun (at least to me) is mostly in overtaking, which doesn’t happen if you’re at the front 😀

I feel the scoreboard does give the game a lot of extra replayability though, because now you’re not competing against dumb AIs, but against real humans. There aren’t a lot of things I enjoy as much in gaming as it is racing against other people. Even though we are only doing time trials (sadly GPC has no multiplayer racing features), beating someone’s time still feels much more exciting to me than winning from any AI.

My main complaint now is that I wish the game would give me better access to the built-in scoreboard. It only seems to appear after a session, but there’s no way to access it directly?

Otherwise GPC seems to be a pretty solid racer, especially for the time. Of course the format has since been massively improved upon, and I must say I enjoy some other racing games from that era such as Test Drive II quite a bit more, but still. To me, the few things that GPC offers are well done and still quite enjoyable.