Escapist Magazine

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

The Escapist

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

Link to the Escapist website

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com

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

Every Wednesday a new game review is put on to the Escapist Magazine website.

This week Yahtzee is reviewing Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii.

The Escapist