TOCA Race Driver 3 – Hands On
TOCA Race Driver 3 – Hands On
At GME 2005, we hooked up with the Codemasters to have a look at some of their up-coming games and have a chat about games in general… From PSP to PC, the Codies are bringing out a fair slew of titles which should satisfy the needs of most gamers… be they speed junkies, actions addicts or RPG fans… So let’s have a look and see what they’re up to.
Let’s kick off with one of my personal favourites, the TOCA series. I’ll happily admit that this game was responsible for me forking out £80 on a wheel just to be able to slam my Vectra up the arse of a BMW, allowing me to take my suppressed road rage out on the digital versions rather than the real thing. The TOCA Race Driver series was criticised in later incarnations for the whole story mode thing, which, to be honest, did get in the way of going out and just racing. However, this time around, all that stuff has been shuffled into more of a background role with the emphasis firmly on flinging a variety of cars around a huge array of authentic tracks.
Sam Cordier from the Codies sat down with me on the PS2 version of TOCA Race Driver 3 and took me on a virtual driving test, which, if it had been real life, his nerves would have never recovered.
”TOCA Race Driver 3 is the Codemasters’ biggest racing game so far with more races and cars in there than anything else we’ve done. For example, just going on the number of different race types, you’ve got GT, Off Road, Touring Cars, Historic, Open Wheel, Rally and Oval race disciplines, all of which have a career path to follow to get to the pinnacle of that race mode…”
Taking the Open Wheel races as an example, if that was your bag of spanners, you’d start off on Go-Karts, moving through to Formula 1000, then Formula BMW, Formula 3000 and finally F1, which is where all the best birds in the skimpiest shorts are… which are sadly not modelled in the game… oh well.
Sam is keen to point out the attention to detail built into the race model, with pretty much everything customisable to your specific racing style. Entering a Rally Cross race, I picked out a Subaru beast and then toddled off to the garage and started fiddling with the settings. Just about everything on the car is adjustable from brake bias and downforce to gear ratios and initial fuel loads… Sam was a little concerned to see me giving the front extra downforce and knocking the braking over to the rears whilst adjusting the gearing to favour quicker acceleration… But having experience TOCA before, my racing style is to hare into corners at a fair whack, hang the car on the rears whilst turning in then slamming me foot down to blast off once I’m through the bend…
I’m happy to say that all this tinkering did have a noticeable effect, with me eventually getting enough control to slide neatly around the corners, hacking down the outside of the racing line and whipping the car around after only one or two laps of bouncing around the track like a pinball on speed. All of the appalling driving on the previous laps did serve to show off two of TOCA RD 3’s features that you’ll only find in the races themselves, the driver attitude and the physics/damage modelling.
