V8 Supercars: Race Driver : Web Wombat: Games

Yet here I am, sitting here at my ominous black marble desk, steepling my fingers Mr. Burns-style whilst listening to Mozart, examining what appears to be…you guessed it…a V8 Supercars game, cleverly titled V8 Supercars: Race Driver.

It's also variously known as TOCA Race Driver in the UK and France, and Pro Race Driver in the US and Spain.

The other thing I should mention is that I generally don't like console ports, which [haha] V8 Supercars (V8SC) also happens to be. What a coincidence. Yes, definitely a coincidence *beats self over head with dead cod *.

Now, it's obvious from the start just where V8SC's roots lie e.g firmly embedded in the Xbox's shiny black casing, and this just becomes more apparent as time goes by and the arcadiness jumps to the forefront of your conciousness, apparent no matter where you turn.

From the complete lack of mouse support in the menus to the way in which the steering wheel support doesn't go much further than rudimentary "rumble pack" vibrations, arcadey rules supreme.

Forgetting the general arcadey nature of V8 Supercars for a second, I just want to focus for a few minutes on one particularly grating section of the game before I get onto the positives, and it's a very big section, let me tell you: It's called the Career mode.

Normally, most racing games wouldn't bother with an actual career mode as such, yet Codemasters have implemented one, and it's a good one for the most part, finally convincing the Aussie petrol heads to please stand up and make themselves known by giving them such tantalising options and rewards such as jumping teams, competing in overseas competitions and, of course, winning big fat trophies full of hot cash.

But, as I said before beginning this carefully planned rant, it's not all roses, nonono! When playing in Career mode, the said career you are managing is that of one arrogant prat known as Ryan McKane and, no, you can't even change the name.

Now, normally I wouldn't mind having an avatar for the game, but McKane makes me want to reach in to my monitor and beat him across his Michelin-sponsored helmet with a tyre iron.

He's so painfully cocky, not to mention full of himself and, worse luck, he just gets more irritating as the game goes on.

Ford's AU Falcon demonstrates a four wheel lock-up

By the end, you begin to wonder why someone just doesn't run him over in the pit lane and save the world a lot of grief in the long run.

Also, his hair is quite, quite horrific, aesthetically speaking, to the point where McKane putting on his helmet is a cause for wild applause and much celebration.

Oh, and since we're on the topic of drivers, I might as well make a point of talking about your competition.

While reasonably intelligent and skilled, sometimes the other driver will display signs of being Artificially Inane (possibly Insane, too).

This is most evident during the beginning of the race, where these guys make it their personal goal in cyber-life to run every single car - both in front and behind - off the starting line, before braking at every corner about 10 seconds too early, creating monumental pile ups that, while fun to watch, sort of detract from the actual racing experience.

For those of us who can stay relatively sane throughout the cutscenes, the game gets better. On the upside, V8 Supercars: Race Driver is definitely pleasing to the eye, with ridiculously high-poly cars, particle FX coming out the ears, high resolution textures and a very pretty, if somewhat unrelated to reality, damage model that will see cars shedding parts like it's going out of style (although this causes exactly nil change as far as actual car performance goes).

You could reduce one of these ingame models to basically a steering column, four tyres and an engine and it'd still drive like a freshly minted Lamborghini Diablo, despite the actual lack of any streamlining to speak of.

While speaking of cars, V8 Supercars isn't exactly lacking in that department, with roughly 42 vehicles to choose from and about the same number of tracks, including 7 of our own circuits, such as Bathurst's Mountain of Thunder, Eastern Creek, Sandown, and Phillip Island (Huzzah - Ed).

As with all things game-related, the better the graphics, the higher the system requirements; I wouldn't suggest anybody without at least 1.3GHz behind the processor and a Geforce4/Radeon 9xxx should start getting too excited about getting behind the wheel until a system upgrade has been, as they say in the best press releases, "affected".

Now, much has apparently been made of V8SC's sound effects, but I'm sorry to say that I was totally unable to hear anything of any substance at all, on account of the fact that, probably thanks to some lazy programmer too busy playing Solitaire to actually do their job and recode the Xbox's sound codecs, V8SC doesn't support on-board sound (the Audigy 2 is in the mail!), producing high pitched wails and not much else in the presence of an AC'97 VIA chipset.

In all the console ports that have passed through my machine, I've never seen any ever reject the onboard soundcard.

A Holden Commodore also locks up the brakes

Those of you who actually have hardware sound cards are, according to my pamphlet, in for a treat, but everyone else who hasn't bothered to separate their sound from their motherboard will either pass V8SC over or make it a reason to purchase a real sound card.

A small extra is that each of the cars have cockpit views; admittedly most of the 42 automobiles use generic cockpit models.

But some of the unique cars (the Mini Cooper springs to mind) have totally different interior designs which, while not exactly important, add a subtle air of autheticity to the proceedings, not to mention that staring at a Mini dashboard is just cool in itself. Bring me my fluffy dice!

So, in the end, V8 Supercars has more in common with Daytona than Papyrus's NASCAR Racing 2003, or even Grand Prix Legends for that matter and, while there are lots of things that probably make this a product to be somewhat cautious of at first, the hardcore V8 fan will probably buy it anyway regardless of what I say.

However, anyone else just curious or even slightly fanatical is advised to give this a good pre-purchase spin via the wellworn rental system before investing their hard-earned dosh. Add 10% to the overall score if you're a V8 aficionado.

Game: V8 Supercars: Race Driver
System: PC
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Codemasters
Distributor: GameNation

Rating: 75%

(Ratings Key/Explantion)

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