Bizarre Creations' Gareth Wilson Comments by Oli Welsh

First

Hm, I am not convinced. I like arcade racers, but they're a dime a dozen these days, while sims/semi-sims have all but disappeared.

Why are all the screenshots smeared with vaseline?

This is one of only two sites i visit where people post "first". Congratulations....

Anyway i trust Bizarre, i believe they're talented enough to pull it off. I want this to be good.

/points UncleLou in the direction of Forza/RacePro

Well, yeah, but Race Pro is just a console port of a game I've been playing for years (in various, not too different versions). So there's Forza left.

That ain't a lot. As opposed to Burnout, Fuel, Blur, Grid, Pure, NfS, etc.

Maybe NfS: Shift does the trick.

I'm very hyped for this. PGR is probably my favorite racing series, but after the fourth one it got kind of stale. Read in one of the earlier articles comments-section that Amon Tobin is probably gonna be responsible for the music, so i've got a feeling it will at least have the style down.

I'm a little mixed about the weapons, on one hand i can actually see how they could work if put directly into PGR where the AI have a nasty tendency of just driving away without ever being seen again. Maybe this can even out the playing field a little. On the other hand i have a hard time seeing how they're supposed to create the same competitiveness that the Kudos-system induced, if the power ups are random it's hard to take a high score serious.

I think a good way of doing it would be to have kudos earn power ups, which in my opinion would actually strenghten the gameplay of PGR immensely. I'm a big fan of both Mario Kart and futuristic racers, but do think the best system so far is the one found in F-Zero (and Star wars: Racer) where using turbo lowers the HP of your vehicle, which really adds a tactical aspect.

Wonder how the guys like (or dislike ;) ) the PS3 hardware, and if they're tempted to do a Geometry Wars type game using the SPUs for PSN - could be pretty crazy, but they probably won't and make something multi-platform instead.

Midnight Club:LA has a pretty decent driving physics. It's also one of the few arcade racer that actually supports steering wheel and in the case of MC:LA even the 900 deg wheel like the Logitech G25. The handling is decidedly more arcade than it is sim but it is closer to GT4 than it is to Burnout.
My main staple in gaming is either sims like GT and Forza or arcade racers like Burnout and NFS and of all the new titles coming out soon, NFS: Shift is at the top of my list because of the developer (Slightly Mad Studios aka Blimey Studio known for their PC racing sim GTR2). Blur, I'm afraid is the one that I'll probably be skipping over beacuse of their past games- PGR was never my cup of tea. But I'm more than willing to be proven wrong.

Since I no longer have the patience for sim racers anymore, and along with my love for Burnout Paradise, Blur and Split/Second are the two racers I'm most excited by. (plus I'm not going anywhere near a Codemasters racer).

Also interested by the Wipeout influence as I've been playing the PSN one a lot recently.

I’m a little confused, do people consider PGR a sim? I always thought of it as more arcadey.

I loved the handling model in the PGR’s they made drifting brilliant fun (I’m rubbish at drifting in Forza and GT) and I liked the Kudos system. I think the handling model would be perfectly suited for a pure drifting game, point to point mountain roads, loads of Japanese custom cars

I have mixed feelings on this new one though, weapons sounds a bit shit. But like someone else has said, it was starting to become a bit stale after PGR4, so I guess they need to do something new (please no bikes)

I like the sound of the community features.

For some reason I liked the objectively worse Gothams better. I liked the first one but I didn't like the second one, although it had more variety and better course design because the graphics were too grey and the framerate dropped. I liked the third one because it looked fresh but didn't care about the fourth one because the bikes were a turn-off and it was still running with 30 fps.

A more arcadey game is welcome as long as we get an arcade framerate. Hint: it's not 30

Also, anybody who uses the phrase "going forward" should automatically get jail time

"we should be going back to the reason play racing games... get back to that sort of OutRun, Road Rash golden age of racing."

Would love to, but EA seem totally uninterested in making any more games in the Road Rash series. Quite why that is completely eludes me.