The fantasy off-road arcade racer Motorstorm is now a few months old. A new game, Dirt, has my full attention. Dirt is the latest iteration of Codemasters' Collin McRae racing games. I haven't been a fan of the series in the past but Dirt is a complete reworking of the series, and turns out to be the best rally racing game to date, in my opinion.
England
For those who don't know, rally racing is arguably the most difficult and nail-biting of the car racing genres. Although rally cars may not reach speeds that formula racers do, other factors make the racing just as intense, if not more so. For one thing, it's often on non-paved surfaces and the courses are actual roads instead of looped tracks. The roads raced on in a seasonal series may be in numerous countries and spread out enough that the drivers of the cars can't possibly be familiar with every twist and turn. So they are forced to race down these roads as fast as they can, not knowing what's coming up around the bend.
Driving from this view is extremely difficult but very fun.
Australia
That's where the co-pilot, or the navigator comes in. Because the drivers don't know where they are going at breakneck speeds, the navigator tells them what to expect. They do this by reading charts indicating how sharp each corner is, and how long until the the next corner. The sharpness of the curve is on a scale of 1 to six, 1 being sharpest and 6 the most gradual. So if the navigator says something like "right 4, left 6 over crest, 100" it would mean you were approaching a moderate right turn followed by a slight left curve that rises over a crest and then a 100 meter stretch of road before the next direction. It verbally creates a temporary map of the present in the drivers head. It's Zen racing. The driver has to remember the sometimes long strings of verbal directions while actually racing the car through those directions as fast as possible. You are always racing as fast as possible through directions you just heard a few seconds prior, while at the same time listening to and remembering different directions that you will have to follow in a few more seconds. If the navigator or the driver loses track of where they are then it can quickly result in a wreck. Dirt does a great job of creating tracks based on real world locations and making the racing fast enough that as a player, you MUST listen to what the navigator is telling you, or you will definitely fly off the road.
Germany
The cars in Dirt feel too light and turn through a center point instead of like an actual car but i've managed to get used to it. Motorstorm (which isn't actually the same kind of game, but is an off road racer) certainly has better physics and particle effects, and slightly better rendered vehicles (Dirt has far more vehicles to choose from). Where Dirt really shines is in the tracks and the vegetation around those tracks. The environments are lush, whether in the wet moors of England, the forested mountains of Japan, or the bright desert of the southwestern U.S and Australia. There is tons of vegetation and it's actually recognizable. Draw distances are large. Codemasters did a great job at deciding at what point in the distance to start using lower rez textures. Some tracks you never notice a drop of detail with distance, but some tracks, like Pikes Peak they seem to control the camera to try and hide uglier low detail areas in the distant vistas.
In Japan, tall wet grass glistens on the roadside.
The game also offers a heck of a lot to do. I'm surprised at how many rally tracks are available. Some of them are as long as 10 miles. But besides the rally track are CORR racing truck events, buggy racing on those same tracks, rally cross tracks and some tracks for an interesting event i was entirely unfamiliar with called Crossover racing.
All in all i've been impressed with Dirt. It's far and above any of the past entries in the series and the best racer to come along on the Xbox 360. I'll be interested to see how the PS3 version looks in a couple of months.
It sounds absurd, and really, it is, but racing a semi with a huge spoiler up the side of a desert mountain is a lot of fun.
