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Grand Prix 3 (GP3) doesn't need much introduction if you have played Geoff Crammond's previous title, Grand Prix 2. Grand Prix 2 was, and still is, one of the best known and best selling of all computer racing simulations. GP3 tries to continue on this path. It models the 1998 F1 season with all 22 drivers, 11 teams and 16 tracks. GP3 has been 4 years in the making and with a huge hype surrounding it, especially, during the last year before its release this summer. Can it destroy the tough opposition from the likes of EA Sports (F1 2000) like GP2 did a little over 4 years ago? Read on.
MY SETUP:
- Intel Celeron 366@458 MHz CPU
- 64MB RAM
- 3Dfx Voodoo3-3000 AGP video card
- Sound Blaster Live Value sound card
- 50x CD-ROM drive
- Windows 98
- Guillemot Ferrari Force Feedback wheel
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:
- Intel Pentium 266 MHz or AMD K6-2 or higher CPU
- 32MB RAM
- 2MB DirectX compatible video card (8MB RAM DirectX 7.0 compatible 3D card for 3D-mode)
- DirectX 7.0 compatible sound card
- 4x CD-ROM drive
- 100 MB hard drive space
- Windows 95/98
PACKAGING:
The box is in red and white colour with a shot of Mika Hakkinen (McLaren #8) and Eddie Irvine (Ferrari #4) on the front side. It doesn't look too bad but it's nothing special. On the back side there are some in game screenshots and the key features of the game are listed. You can also see the system requirements and ELSPA age recommendation (3+).
Inside the box you will find a 2000 Microprose product catalogue and more interestingly, the manual itself. The manual, although very similar to the one in GP2, is quite nice with 174 pages of useful information. There was one problem with my manual, though, as it had over 30 pages missing (including the circuit maps) and some sections were repeated twice. The manual covers everything from installing the game, to setting up your controller, graphic options, to refining your car setups and driving skills. It's a good read especially for rookies.
INSTALLATION:
The installation is simple, just put the CD-ROM disc in and if Autorun is enabled in Windows, the installation program will launch. From there you just need to follow the simple installation routine and choose things like installation directory and how much of the game you want installed on your hard drive. You can also choose to install DirectX7 if you don't have it on your system yet. After 5-10 minutes the installation is complete.
When you launch the game, the first thing that will come up is the introduction video. It shows some footage of real F1 races and is the kind of video you will only watch once. Next the game asks if you wish to calibrate your graphics. This is a series of test runs at different resolutions to determine the optimum graphical setting for your system. I didn't find this very useful, as I had to later change the graphic settings quite a bit to make the game run smoothly.
MENU SYSTEM & OPTIONS:
From the start-up menu you can choose to do a quick race or go to the main menu. In a quick race you just need to choose a track and you will be immediately taken to the starting grid. In the main menu there are several options. You can choose your team and driver, the track, race type and difficulty. There are 4 different race types: quick race, practice, non-championship race and championship season. In practice mode you can choose a circuit and do as many laps as you like without other cars. This is great for learning the circuits and developing your setups. A non-championship race consists of a full race weekend with practice and qualifying sessions and of course the race itself. Championship season is the ultimate challenge, consisting of 16 race weekends with the first one being in Melbourne, Australia.
You can also access 4 options, which are continuously visible in the top right corner. These are system information, music on /off, disable joystick control in menus and minimize program. These are self-explanatory and especially the last one is useful in some situations. But let's have a look at the more important options in the game.
Good controller options are very important in a racing simulation and GP3 is similar to GP2 in this area. You can choose one of the four controller 'presets' (keyboard, gamepad, joystick and wheel) but if you have a wheel it's best to do your own controller set for it. One big plus in GP3 is that you can calibrate your wheel in the game so you don't have to use Windows calibration values. After calibration it's time to look at the advanced menu. This part of GP3 is really well done because you can really tune the feeling of a controller to your liking. For example you can set the maximum lock and sensitivity to suit your own controller. You can also map a clutch to a button or to one of the joystick / wheel axis. There are also some negative points in the controller setup. The game only recognizes 4 buttons on 'Joystick A' and 'Joystick B' so even if you have more buttons on your controller you can't use them all. The most disappointing point, however, is the lack of split axis support for pedals. Nowadays, this is a must have feature for all serious racing simulations! Some simulations, which were released two years ago have split axis support. This is a big minus for an otherwise well done controller setup menu. If you have a force feedback wheel you can set the strength of it from 0% to 100%. Four different control sets can be saved in addition to the four presets.
The graphics options also offers a lot of settings to tweak. The resolution can be chosen from 512x384 to 1280x1024. In the advanced menu you can get rid of things like trackside objects, kerbs, hills and smoke to take some of the load off your CPU and video card. One new option in GP3 compared to GP2 is that the cockpit view angle can be changed from 100% to 145%. The higher number shows more of the cockpit but also requires more CPU power. The frame rate can also be set to a desired value, the maximum being 25.6 fps as opposed to, for example, 36 fps in Grand Prix Legends.
The sound options are pretty simple. You can only change the volume of the music, the car engine, skid sounds and sound effects.
In race options you can choose the length of the practice, qualifying and race sessions. You can also change your grid position for a quick race. The weather can be toggled from realistic to custom, where you can adjust the probability of rain. Other options here are for multiplayer on the same computer and choosing the opposition (AI) spread, which controls the computer drivers' speed. From the race options menu you can also access the car realism menu, where the different car failures can be toggled on or off. This includes 8 different failures from punctures to an engine failures.
In the driving aids menu, there are 8 different aids to help in learning the game. For example, you can let the computer do the shifting and braking. The number of available driving aids is dependant on the difficulty setting you chose. On rookie level you can turn them all on and with ace difficulty you can only turn on automatic gears with throttle and steering help.
In the main screen there are still some menus like multiplayer, load game and workshop where you can view circuit records or performance analyses. As you have probably noticed, there are a lot of menus to go through and in the beginning it might seem a bit confusing although a lot of the options are self-explanatory and for some settings you get a nice pop up textbox explaining how that setting affects the game. The menu interface could use some tweaking because sometimes you have to go through a lot of menus and mouse clicks to get to the option you want to change.
PHYSICS & GAMEPLAY:
Enough of the menus, it's time to get down to some driving and have a look at how the car handles. Before you go driving, you can choose the amount of fuel (in laps), change tyre set/compounds or you can go and tweak the car settings. Let's talk about car setups later because it's time to go driving.
The first impression is that it feels surprisingly similar to GP2. The car is quite easy to drive even with all driving aids off. You need to be careful with the throttle in 1st and 2nd gear because it's very easy to spin it around and you can't really do controlled burnouts like you sometimes see the real drivers do. As I mentioned, the car is easy to drive up to a point. When you're really getting close to the limit, it starts to feel like a modern F1 car with grooved tyres should probably feel. I, of course, haven't driven a real F1 car but you can get some idea from real drivers' comments and watching the cars on TV. The car has an enormous amount of grip, especially in the faster corners but when you start to lose it you have very little time to react. Depending on your car setup you can induce the car to slide and still catch it, but the line between being on the limit or out of control is very thin. However, the time when you are really struggling for grip is when you're accelerating out of 1st gear hairpins. You need a gentle right foot (or hand, if you're using a joystick) or you will be spinning out in no time. You can also lock the brakes if you're braking too hard into a corner. So the 'feel' of the game seems to be right? Well, close but not quite there. There are some odd situations when you have a feeling you're not really driving a car. One example is when you're going over the kerbs (curbs for you in the U.S.) and you have two wheels - sometimes even all four - on the grass. The tyres don't seem to lose any grip and you can just keep the pedal to the metal without any fear of spinning. Another example is when you're going into a slow hairpin, the car just seems to be destined to spin, no matter what you do or how slow you're going. It seems that in some parts the physics modelling works very well but in other parts it lacks that something. Comparing the physics to some of its modern F1 competitors I'd say GP3 is quite evenly matched with F1 2000 and above the rest.
One nice gimmick that you'll notice right away when going driving for the first time is the moving steering wheel. It has a lot of information on it, like speed, current gear, water temperature etc. I like the moving wheel a lot as I feel it adds a lot to the feeling of driving a F1 car. After searching the menus for a while, I didn't find an option to turn the moving steering wheel off, which is a shame for those people who don't like it.
The damage modelling is poor, as you need to hit a wall really hard before you lose a wing or a tyre. Touching tyres with an opponent may lead to one of the cars flying through the air and ending upside down. I've had some mechanical failures, like getting stuck with 5th gear only but overall the damage modelling could have been a lot better.
Track modelling is better than in other modern F1 simulations! The elevations changes are where they should be and the corners are well done. Only thing that seems to be missing at some tracks is camber in the corners.
The replay features in GP3 are the same as those in GP2. In one word, ancient. You can only replay the last 20 seconds of the action. You can't rewind or fast-forward. 20 seconds is all you have and to top it off, you can't save the replay buffer. You can save a "hotlap" and view the action from that lap later but this isn't really a solution these days, as in other simulations you can save the entire race. There are a few in car and outside views along with a TV camera to be used when viewing a replay. You can also use these views when driving but most of them are not very useful for that purpose.
There are still some missing features in GP3, which many thought would be in it. You can't jump the start and there are no stop & go penalties for example. You can get a black flag (sometimes very easily) for taking a short cut, but then the car just slows down to about 120 kph for 10 seconds.
FORCE FEEDBACK:
Force feedback is supported in GP3, although there aren't that many effects in the game. You can't feel anything when you drive over a kerb or hit a wall. But more importantly, the "driving feel" is pretty well done as you can feel when the back end starts to step away. Especially in the wet when you get on the throttle too hard and the back end does a little twitch, you can feel this really nicely through the steering wheel. With my Guillemot Ferrari FF wheel the effects seemed to be a little weak even with the FF scaling slider set to 100%. Overall, the force feedback is well done, and it's much better than in many other simulations, although its not up there with Grand Prix Legend's FF-implementation.
RACE WEEKEND AT HUNGARORING:
I did a 50% (39 laps) race with all aids off and with Ace difficulty at Hungaroring and decided to write a small report of the events to give you a better view of some of the features in GP3.
I skipped both Friday and Saturdays free practice sessions because I had done quite a few laps on this track before. So off to qualifying and the forecast showed dry weather for the next two hours. I loaded my setup that I had created before and chose hard compound tyres. The compound you choose for qualifying is the one you have to do the race with and I wanted to be sure that the tyres would last in the race, because Hungaroring is quite hard on tyres. Off I went to the track and I was the first car out. I immediately did a 1:14.616 lap and went back to pits. I accelerated the time to see what times the other drivers were posting. They were almost 3 seconds behind so it looked likely that I wouldn't have to do another lap. When the session ended Coulthard was 2nd 2.5 seconds behind, with Schumacher and Hakkinen right behind.
Then it was time for the warmup to test my race setup. This time it was raining and that was predicted to continue for the whole 30-minute session. I made some modifications to my setup, like raising the ride height so the plank wouldn't wear too much in the race. Then I went to the track with intermediate tyres. This was the wrong decision as the track was too wet for intermediate tyres and I was slower than a few other drivers and I even had one of the faster corners. I went back to the pits to change to proper wet tyres. They were hard compounds as that's what I chose in qualifying. Now I was much faster and the car handled very well, now it was time to head to the race.
Weather forecast now predicted dry weather for the whole race. I had created a dry race setup before so I just loaded that. Before the race you can make changes to your pit stop strategy, you can change your setup or choose your tyre compounds if it's raining. Now I was ready for the race. There's no warmup lap so you are placed immediately on the grid. As the red lights went out I got a good start and lead the race out of the first corner. The first laps were quite boring and by the 8th lap I had already built up a 12 second gap over Hakkinen, who was in 2nd place. On the same lap Barrichello had a transmission problem and as he slowed down Panis rear ended him. Both lost a wheel and they were out of the race. On lap 11 I lapped Rosset, who didn't really give me room to overtake. On lap 14 there were more slower cars ahead and this time some of them actually moved over to let me by. On the next lap the car was starting to get loose and as a result I spun in the penultimate corner. I had a gap of over 20 seconds so I didn't lose any positions. For the next few laps everything went well. On lap 18 I saw smoke in my mirrors, my engine had blown. I coasted a few hundred meters until the car came to a stop.
I decided to watch the AI cars race for the last 21 laps. On the same lap that I retired some of the drivers went to the pits to change tyres and refuel. GP3 offers a "director's view", which is like a TV feed from the real F1 races. It changes views, shows retirements and other moments in the race although sometimes it misses some important action on the track. There was lots of passing going on, including Ralf passing his older brother, who seemed to be in trouble as he dropped back and eventually finished in 9th place. Many drivers were blocking the inside line into turn 1 and the racing looked really impressive. Hakkinen won the race 1.5 seconds ahead of Coulthard. Rest of the top 6 were R. Schumacher, Irvine, Fisichella and Hill.
I had saved the race on lap 16 and after the race had ended I tried re-loading it to see if the engine would blow up in the same place. It did, so it seems that the game decides before the race if there will be any mechanical failures.
CONCLUSION:
Overall GP3 is a bit of a disappointment as some of the features are the same as they were in GP2 four years ago. Some important features, like Internet multiplay, are completely missing. Dynamic weather is GP3's strongest point, and this coupled with good driving feel along with playability makes it the best modern F1 simulation, just beating out F1 2000.
PROS:
- Dynamic weather
- Driving feel
- Car setups and telemetry
- AI is aggressive
- Force Feedback
CONS:
- No Internet multiplay
- Replay system
- Damage modelling
- Missing sound from other cars
- Missing rules, like stop & go
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