The first being for the Aston Martin V8 Vantage.

Next we have the Bentley Continental GT.

They have also released images of both the Lamborghini Gallardo and the Lamborghini Murcielago.

Source: Seriouswheels

View tutorial at Skeletorscorpse.com

The already extremely capable monster has been turned into the world’s fastest and most powerful Lamborghini Murcièlago by edo competition: the edo LP710 /2.

Source: Serious Wheels

Project Kahn is proud to announce the launch of the new Bentley Continental GTS ‘Black Edition’.

The ‘Black Edition’ has an eight-piece body consisting of a three piece rear valance, two side skirts, a two piece front valance and a rear boot spoiler. This kit has been developed by our Project Kahn design team and has undergone many hours of testing not only to ensure safety but also to ensure that a perfect fit is achieved for each car.

The ‘Black Edition’ package contains a full interior styling programme which includes a bespoke Project Kahn Luxury Leather upgrade and high gloss piano black interior fascia panels with the optional extras of either a high gloss piano black steering or a carbon fibre finish steering wheel. Each car comes with privacy tinted glass perfectly matched to compliment the cars exterior.

Source: SeriousWheels

Also check out Project Kahn’s new updated website.

This was my first test of CG Jetseal.

Car was washed and rinsed with Sonus Gloss Shampoo, then dried using Sonus Der Wunder drying towel. I then went over with some Megs Last Touch quick detailer and Eurow MF towels.

Jetseal was then applied using a german applicator and buffed off with Eurow MF towels and Last Touch QD.

Vauxhall Vectra, originally uploaded by p4th3t1c.

Reflections came out pretty well for silver and quite a lot of flake is visible.

This used to be a Mazda RX7 which was tuned by some scooter company that begins with V that I can’t remember.

The car was featured in 2 Fast 2 Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Brand new VW Passat. This is the 3.0 V6 R36 which costs £36,000.

I have played it on PC and Xbox 360 and I would personally say PC is better.

Gameplay

The style of game is arcade, which surprised me as I was expecting a game to compete a bit more against GT5.  But that wasn’t too much of a problem as I prefer arcade driving games such as Need for Speed, although ProStreet was rather annoying.

I find the game is similar to Project Gotham Racing but only better looking.

A very nice feature of the game is something called flashback.  If you crash and write off your car you can use the flashback feature to rewind through the race and pick up from a certain point in which you can avoid the accident.  Not only is it a useful feature for when you crash but it is actually pretty good to use, it acts like replays do in any other game then you press the designated flashback button (F12 for PC, X for 360) and the game will carry on from that point.

Damage is also a very good feature which is a lot better than I thought it was going to be, which by itself puts it ahead of NFS:PS.

Another positive about the game which I haven’t seen used in any other game is in the profile system you can chose your firstname from a list so the computer can actually speak out your name rather than you having a set name like in NFS:PS or having name spoken out like in PGR.  All you do is type your firstname and surname in to the create profile screen and you are then given a list of names to chose from which will automatically select your firstname ready for confirmation if it is in the list.  The game contains male and female names as well as a list of nicknames.

Controls

I played both using the Xbox 360 controller and the controls just seemed a bit more responsive with the PC.  The plus side on the 360 is the fact that all the controls are on the controller.  Even if you use a controller on the PC you have to use the keyboard for some functions such as the flashbacks.

Graphics

Running on an E6750, 3GB ram, 8800GTS 320MB at 1920×1200 with AA set to MSAAx2 the fps stayed above 35fps at all times, staying around 40fps most of the time and graphically at this settings was better than the 360.  The 360 did look a lot better on the loading screens and menus though, I can only assume the PC version had a slightly degraded graphics for the menus and loading screens to make the game work on lower spec PCs.

The smoke from the tyres is very good though, a lot more impressive than NFS.

Conclusion

All in all I think GRID is a very good game.  Not a great game, but a good game. If you are tired of GTA IV or you don’t like GTA IV and no new good games come out then it is worth a purchase.

If you have a good PC with a wired 360 controller I would get the PC version, otherwise get the 360 version or if you don’t have a 360 and a shit PC, but have a PS3, get it for PS3. If you have none, don’t buy it…..

EDIT: I have found out that GameTrailers have done a side by side HD video of the GRID; PS3 vs Xbox 360.  From the video the graphics are almost identical, the only visible difference is that the PS3 colours seem to be a bit washed out in comparison to the 360 version.  You can watch the video here.

Of course some games are getting stark reviews for their graphics by reviewers. Most people will realise that I am refering to games such as Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3, Timeshift and of course Crysis.  Yes, these games are graphically stunning especially Crysis, but what I haven’t seen in the vast majority of reviews of these games is that they do take very high end equipment to run at a respectable speed the graphics options turned up.  The most I see usually is a comment in the Cons section of the review which usually states ‘high end PC required for top graphics settings’.  That is fair enough to a degree, but hardware from a year ago should be able to play games with a highish degree of playability with high settings, not max, but high.

Crysis which I will pick out on is the worst of the group I have listed. It is good looking, on high to very high settings.  Now play Crysis on a 6-series or a 7-series Nvidia card and all of a sudden you are playing Crysis on medium settings with stuttering performance with a game that doesn’t really look all that much better than the current Source engine that Half Life 2 Episode 2 is running on.

How many of the current first person shooters have had you wanting to play more because of the gameplay?  I have to say none of the above.  Perhaps my taste in fps games is changing but the last game that I felt compelled to finish was Portal.  It was genuinely interesting and humourous.

Crysis

Graphically stunning, but doesn’t have a lot over any other first person shooter except for the suit.  The suit gives an actual reason for not dying from more than 2 shots from an enemy AK-47, although they are called something different in the game as it is from the future, yet the cars and boats seem to have been taken out of a 1998 catalogue.  From what I have played of Crysis you don’t have a whole lot of freedom with the game.  It is still linear like all other FPS’s but it has to be.  Even Postal was linear with the jobs you had to do, but like Crysis you could go around and do other things inbetween.

Gears of War

On the Unreal 3 engine it does look good, but the feel just isn’t right for the PC.  I played it on the 360 when it was first released and didn’t really like it, mainly due to the controls.  But I find myself wishing I was using the 360 controller again as the game was somewhat easier to play.

The only thing that seperates Gears of War with any other FPS seems to be that it isn’t an FPS, but has similarities with all other FPS’s.  Over the shoulder camera angle makes this game a nuisance and I would recommend it to be avoided unless you can rent it for the 360.

Unreal Tournament 3

A game that I have been looking forward to for years.  But alas after playing the “beta demo” I was moderately impressed, but also dissappointed.  The demo was released with only the low-medium textures, but even so the game did look incredible and one can only hope that AA is included in the graphics options for the full game which I should be recieving my copy very very soon, so yes that does mean I bought it.  The game felt like 2004 with some nice shiney paint and polished to give that better look.  The action is still fast paced and full of action, but it does seem darker, more evil… that is not to say that Unreal Tournament 2004 wasn’t a good game.  Far from it. It was an excellent game and still has a huge fan base but Unreal Tournament 3 gives no extras except for graphics in my eyes.

TimeShift

Well the timeshifting ability seemed good at the start but after a while got very boring and  was the only difference from all other games.  The graphics were good and it ran OK, but was very linear and didn’t even give a feel of any freedom.  Although saying that it ran very well on max settings with a medium-high end PC.

Call of Duty 4

A game I am genuinely interested in.  I am now pretty much addicted to the multiplayer part of the game and have found the single player shortcut not being used.  I have done the first couple of missions and the game seems to be what GRAW should have been but better and faster.

It seems Infinity Ward listened to the people that actually play the game rather than telling the gamers what they “want”.  It was also good to see them release 2 patches with a couple of days within each other to try to make the game as fair as possible fixing a glitch in the game.  Fair play to them, I believe it is a first I have said anything nice about IW.

PC

After downloading the demo which was over 100MB bigger than the Xbox 360 counter part, it installed fairly quickly although it had to be extracted from a WinRAR archive which meant that the install time was greatly increased but file size was smaller than it would of been without it.

The game launches with the absolute minimum settings. Resolution is set to 640×480, all graphics settings are either off or on low. The audio setting is set to low rather than high. This also caused a problem with having the settings this low, the game started up extremely slowly and it wasn’t until I put all the settings to maximum that the game ran smoothly so I could actually race.

I first did the Speed Challenge, which is basically going as fast as you can through checkpoints every so often. This is situated on a rough road with cracks surrounded by dust and lots of metal poles (the poles play an important role on PC, I will explain later on).

Graphically the game looks very good, equal to it’s Xbox 360 counterpart at top settings. The 1 thing I did notice was that out of the 4 races that I did, only 1 race smoke came from my wheels. On the Xbox 360 every race started with a screen full of smoke with the brake lights just appearing through.

My first attempt at the Speed Challenge was actually on the Xbox 360, so this is more or less the problems with the PC over the Xbox 360.

First off, I tried with the keyboard. Not too bad, I finished the race and the car pretty much did what I told it to. So I plugged in my Xbox 360 controller to my PC, installed the latest drivers and the problems started.

I will state this first, I have never had a problem with any games on PC and the Xbox 360 controller. The first problem came from the menu system. Pressing up, resulted in going down, pressing down resulted in no response. I pressed every button on the controller only to find none of the buttons were assigned the button to select, so I wasn’t actually able to progress to the race from the menu without resorting the keyboard.

Once getting in to the race, I pressed A which is normally the button to continue, but turns out to be the back or escape button. To which I had to use my keyboard to get back to the race and actually start the race.

I was now at the race screen and reving up the car using the RT button like usual. Finally something worked. It wasn’t until I got to the first slight bend where I found a problem. The sensitivity was off the scale with no visible way to change it (although I didn’t look too hard, because I was already pretty pissed off with EA’s shitty development again). The handling felt arcady all of a sudden. A slight nudge on the analogue stick sent the car going across the road and I ended up drifing most of the race banging in to the metal poles (see I told you) that border the road more or less all the way. I eventually finished the race with my smashed up BMW M3 E92.

Before people start suggesting that it is in fact me that is a bad driver, I disagree. I finished the Speed Challenge without a scratch on the 360 on King level and got 1st place.

The second race that appears on the demo is the Grip Race. A lapped race around an inner city circuit. First across the line wins. Here you are driving the Nissan GT-R, nice car, but makes the race a bit too easy as it is much faster than the other cars in the race.

I didn’t finish a lap on Grip Race on the PC, I just couldn’t use the 360 controller on it. I haven’t got any other controllers to try on NFS ProStreet but I assume they may all suffer the same problem. The popularity of the 360 controller for PC should make it a priority for games developers especially ones that are doing driving games. Who on earth plays driving games with a keyboard?

EA need to pull their finger out and get cracking on the PC version of the game. I have pre-ordered Pro Street, but I have preordered for the Xbox 360 instead, and a wise investment it looks.

Xbox 360

Perfection. Well compared to the PC demo it is anyway. Zero slow downs on 1080p, graphics look the same as max on the PC demo with what looks like only 2xAA, but I may be wrong.  The handling is a lot more realistic and you don’t end up drifting round the tracks.

Conclusion

If you liked the PC one then I advise you to get the 360 version if you have a 360 of course. You will enjoy the game a lot more and there is nothing extra that you will achieve by getting the PC version whereas with the 360 version you will get achievements to make you feel better about yourself while your gamer score increases.

For those who haven’t played the demo yet, you can download it from GamersHell.

Mirrors:

• NFSUnlimited.net FTP 1
• NFSUnlimited.net FTP 2
• FileFront
• FilePlanet