V8 Supercars 3 (Best Of) previews

Beware!!! If you want a fun game with easy & unrealistic driving atributes but lots of cars & tracks & don't care if your CD burner F*&c$ out then this is for you… If you want a real driving simulator that cranks graphically & with real (difficult) racing physics then try GTR2 as it is accurate & does NOT have starforce (thank god as the first did & it killed my system)

I have waited a long time to get my hands on a driving game that is as much fun and enough of a challenge to compare to Rallymasters. I loved rallymasters even going as far as to enter a proper worldwide comp for it (I was doing alright then the comp just petered out). It was incredible fun (the perfect arcadey racer) and the racing was very very tight. Toca 3 seems to have managed to create something the equal and actually better.

The online experience is challenging without being frustrating (even on pro-sim settings), The races are realistically close and the sheer variety of vehicle types is almost to much. The tracks are nicely modelled with great bumps, camber changes and accurate layout.

Not only do you get to race on the worlds most famous tracks but you get a lot of the new ones in Asia and other regions which are excellent tracks designed for the modern cars available.

There can be annoying lag problems leading to cars jumping around (a total nightmare on servers with damage on) but I have found they are worst on Aussie servers with asian and european servers running seemingly smoother even though the pings are 150+ms bigger. You can in fact be totally competitive on pings up to 450ms I have found which is a bit of a testament to the network engine in the game. American servers are great too I have found and surprisingly they play a lot of overseas (to them) tracks and car types.

V8, DTM, touring cars seem to be the dominant types played but there is always at least a few open wheel or offroad games if you like that type. The game is well worth a look for those looking for a decent online experience IMHO

people cry that this game has bugs blah blah blah, to be honest the only problem ive had is something wrong with my machine that makes the game lag ive never had anything wrong with the game itself, online play has much better net code then the last 2 versions and some of the cars with leave you with tears after (4×4 off-road trucks)

So I placed the order, visited the store and then raced home. A quick flick through the booklet (hardly what you'd call a manual) and then chuck the DVD in the drive. Oops. Not enough free disk space (6gb required!), so an hours worth or archiving later, we do the install while bathing the kids and getting them off to bed (Daddy's going to be busy, so GO TO SLEEP!).

Fire it up via the desktop icon, and the first thing it does is reboot the machine after installing the “protection software”. Hang on, there's no mention of Starforce on the box is there?? I won't go into the problems I've had previously with Starforce, but they are long and varied and I'm expecting the worst.

After the reboot, the game hasn't auto-run, so I click on the icon again and this time a configuration utility fires up asking me to set Graphics and Sound settings. Happy as. My machine way exceeds the recommended specs, so lets crank it up shall we. Save the settings and start the game again. Cue lots of ads extolling the virues of how well the game will run using a Nvidia card (I've got an ATI), a Pentium 4 (I have an Athlon 64) , a “Bink Video” (which I'm sure I don't have) and various copyright notices. One of those is a joke, BTW.

Time to create a profile. Whack in the name, and it even has a controller setup wizard, so setting up the Wheel is fairly easy. Change some game settings for km/h (this is the UK version) and realistic (bwaaa-haha) handling. then off to the main menu to start a career.

Alas, that's where the easy stuff ends. Tune in for part 2 to find out how my night(mare) progressed…