FI F1 2006D (First impressions, Formula One 2006 demo)

This writer’s more of a NASCAR and D1 fan himself, but – who am I kidding, I’ll take anything that drinks high-octane! With Gran Turismo HD knocked out of the grid, that leaves SCE Liverpool’s F1 Championship Edition 2006 to take the PS3’s checkered flag in the near future. Tool around the demo for a few days, and you’ll find that it’s a pleasant virtual/simulation racer to cut one’s Sony next-gen teeth to. Certainty is no Sunday drive when you try (and fail) to pass Schumi in Turn 3, but that’s the appeal of the racer, not to mention the demo.

As revealed in the IGN inty, you can ask this racer to hold your hand for you through the entire race, or you can be a man and tough it out the hard way. If you ask nicely with the Pause menu, even in the middle of a race, F1 2006 will auto-brake for you, assist in steering through technical corners, auto-recover from spins (which happen way more often than you think), even paint a colored line on the track for you to follow. Turn them assists off all the way, and if you’re not experienced, you’ll soon discover why F1 racing also racks up ridiculously high insurance premiums.

You only get the Quick Race option in this demo: two tracks (Indy and Monza), a small selection of F1 drivers and their cars to select. AI difficulty is selectable, as is car damage, sunny or wet weather, and penalties for DUI-like driving. Here I realized that the physics model the dev team’s building into the game could hold up to the real thing. Lose the front wing, for example, and you lose some of the traction in your steering in high-speed turns.

This is of course a rough impression – I don’t got Alonso’s eyes or touch – but with car damage on and spin recovery off, let’s just say I had an overriding interest in keeping my car intact through the rest of the race. Not that the car lasted up to the end of the race, anyway. Or some other cars in the field, for that matter..

More rough impressions after Turn 4 – er, after the jump.

This writer’s more of a NASCAR and D1 fan himself, but – who am I kidding, I’ll take anything that drinks high-octane! With Gran Turismo HD knocked out of the grid, that leaves SCE Liverpool’s F1 Championship Edition 2006 to take the PS3’s checkered flag in the near future. Tool around the demo for a few days, and you’ll find that it’s a pleasant virtual/simulation racer to cut one’s Sony next-gen teeth on. You’ll see it’s no Sunday drive when you try (and fail) to pass Schumi in Turn 3, but that’s the appeal of the racer, not to mention the demo.

As revealed in the IGN inty, you can ask this racer to hold your hand for you through the entire race, or you can be a man and tough it out the hard way. If you ask nicely with the Pause menu, even in the middle of a race, F1 2006 will auto-brake for you, assist in steering through technical corners, auto-recover from spins (which happen way more often than you think), even paint a colored line on the track for you to follow. Turn them assists off all the way, and if you’re not experienced, you’ll soon discover why F1 racing also racks up ridiculously high insurance premiums.

You only get the Quick Race option in this demo: two tracks (Indy and Monza), a small selection of F1 drivers and their cars to select. AI difficulty is selectable, as is car damage, sunny or wet weather, and penalties for DUI-like driving. Here I realized that the physics model the dev team’s building into the game could hold up to the real thing. Lose the front wing, for example, and you lose some of the traction in your steering in high-speed turns.

This is of course a rough impression – I don’t got Alonso’s eyes or touch – but with car damage on and spin recovery off, let’s just say I had an overriding interest in keeping my car intact through the rest of the race. Not that the car lasted up to the end of the race, anyway. Or some other cars in the field, for that matter.

If you know your F1 on TV, then the GUI should be easy to understand. On an SDTV, the timers might be a bit difficult to gauge, but the important stuff, from tachometer to grid position, is easy to understand. Even if you don’t know your F1 on TV, all that info on your screen should be intuitive, and a few laps (and crashes) should acquaint you with the rest.

Being a demo – and a work in progress, as the loading screen warns – commenting on graphics would be moot, since that could (and will) be changed through the dev process. More so that I was playing on an SDTV. The racer looked quite beautiful nonetheless – perhaps not as sharp as the screenshots, since I was on an SD and this is a demo, but beautiful. Liverpool even drilled down to some small details. Drive on grass, your tires will be coated in grass (not to mention your a** will be grass, too).

Turn on the rain, and you’ll love the spray the cars are kicking up, and the droplets on the camera lens being blown back by the wind. Hit a car hard enough, and pieces of both cars will fly. Speaking of which, crashes are none too spectacular visually (trust me, I’ve tried my d**nest, with all assists off), but crashes are crashes nonetheless: race enders. You don’t want to come out of a turn only to find a stalled car straddling the track.

Maybe it was just me, or maybe it’s just F1, but the audio isn’t exactly ear-splitting. Maybe this writer’s just more used to the growl of NASCAR block engines, or the squelch of D1 drift tires. In-race commentary is typical F1 fare, none too sensational, but informative when it has to be. So, too, is your crew chief, although it would be nice if the guy did give a few track tips.

A couple of dogs that didn’t bark. It’s too bad that Liverpool wasn’t able to sneak multiplayer before getting the demo out in time for the Launch, but that’s dev and coding progress for you. Haven’t heard anything about SIXAXIS motion-sensing in previous coverage, and there’s none featured in this demo, either. Standard stick controls work fine, though. Finally, nothing, too, of PSP interconnectivity demo’d.

The demo/”work-in-progress” of F12006 looks like it’s shaping up to be the F1 sim SCE Liverpool had set out to make. At the same time, it is easily accessible for Formula 1 newbies when they ask nicely. Like we said: absent GTHD, F1 2006 really has to fill those shoes in Sony’s racing lineup for the near future. But it fills those shoes nicely. We can safely say, watch out for this game next year, and we’ll see what improvements and bonuses SCE Liverpool’s thrown in by then. Veterans of other racing circuits (NASCAR, arcade-style, drift) will have to get used to F1’s technical style – no lead-foots allowed, unless you turn on brake assist – but it’s pretty rewarding to actually not drive like it’s Burnout.