It was only very recently that I finally had a moment to hook up the Logitech G25 to my PS3 and to really get to grips with Codemasters’ Colin McRae Dirt. It’s a lot of fun – especially on a 3-meter-wide screen sitting at a distance of 2 meters. I was really looking forward to DiRT 2. It arrived from Amazon.uk today, and I stole an hour off work to try it out.
Well, Codemasters fucked it up good and proper. They bloody well americanized it. They dumbed it down for slack-jawed yokels. The presentation alone made me struggle to keep down my breakfast: the front-end is jammed full of American X Games celebrities mangling the English language with “hip” street talk and utterly fake enthusiasm. People like Travis Pastrana, Dave Mirra and Ken Block. Remember a game called Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX? Yeah, that’s him. Pastrana? He’s a motocross racer and a stunt performer. Ken Block is a rally driver but I never would’ve known that if I hadn’t googled his name.
The first time you launch the game you’re forced to sit through a demonstration of the menu system. It goes on for so long I was shouting at the screen, “Shut up you wanker and let me race!” And the bloody demo doesn’t even mention Options (or I missed it due to professional-level facepalming) which made me start my first race with an automatic gearbox.
There seems to be very little actual rally driving in DiRT 2. During the hour or so I opened perhaps 20 tracks, among them a maximum of 5 proper rally tracks. And the rest? American stadium-style racing with dune buggies, 4×4s and other most definitely non-rally vehicles, complete with fireworks and cheering crowds. Bullshit, in a nutshell. OK, sure, there were plenty of non-rally races in the first game, but it was never this grandiose or in-your-face.
Let me give you a perfect example of the dumbing down: setting up your car. In DiRT you had several screens filled with a hojillion options. You could really set the car exactly the way you wanted it. In DiRT 2 you get one screen with six settings: gear ratio, downforce, suspension, ride height, differential and brake bias. And if that isn’t frustrating enough, each setting has only five values from low to high. That’s grade-A bullshit right there.
By this time you might be wondering if there’s anything good in this game. Well, yes. It recognized the Logitech G25 wheel automatically and supports the H-grid shifter. Not that you really need it, but anyway. The graphics are slightly better and there’s not quite so much glitching or stuttering. I also have to mention the car handling. In fact, I prefer DiRT 2’s modeling of rally car behavior. It feels tighter, ‘heavier’ and the car feels better connected to the road under it. More authentic, in other words. There were moments in DiRT where the car felt like it was sliding on a thin layer of grease, and I felt I wasn’t really in control of the car properly. There’s less of that in DiRT 2 – as far as rally cars are concerned. I won’t comment on other vehicles.
To recap: nerve-grating presentation, bullshit stadium racing, extremely heavy influence of X Games and Xtreme sports, embarrassing dialogue and voice acting, and populated by celebrities better known for something else than rally driving.
What a way to honor the late Colin McRae. Codemasters, you utter bastards.