Sunday Racing Stuff.

This was a great weekend of racing action; on TV (real life and the PS3). First up, congratulations are in order to Corvette for taking first in GT1 today at Le Mans. I wanted a decent amount of SPEED’s coverage, but Le Mans is not the type of race where you just sit down and watch end-to-end. Not to mention the fact that the race is 24 hours, I do actually have a life and commitments outside of watching racing on TV.

Jeff Gordon managed his fuel to a surprise (really a gift) second place finish today in Michigan. He is a healthy second in the Chase, 47 or so points back of Stewart, but only having one win is going to hurt his chances.

PS3 Gaming Update
All this racing action inspired me to try out some PS3 racing. These days I do not have a lot of free time for gaming, and my PS3 is extremely finicky with disc, randomly deciding to read/accept one. This weekend I managed to get in a few minutes with Gran Turismo 5: Prologue and Formula One Championship Edition.

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue
GT5 Prologue is an eye-candy pleasing, fun game, but to be honest, except for the graphics, I like GT4 better. Unfortunately, my two-year old son killed the GT4 disc; I assume I will buy another copy one of these days. I played around with Gt5 Prologue a little; just enough to make me chuckle a couple of times watching the lame AI race around the tracks. Good stuff.

Formula One Championship Edition
Next up was F1CE. This game is still a blast! The simulation mode is far from perfect, and while it is not as brutal as a “pure” simulation, it more than gets the job done. I had a great time just running hot laps in the time trial mode. This game has held up amazing well. It is too bad that there have been no downloadable options, other than rumble support. New circuits, teams, drivers … really any bonus content would be welcome. I think I read somewhere that Codemasters now holds the F1 license, but there is not currently a confirmed PS3 release in the works.

Ferrari Challege
I decided to order Ferrari Challenge for the PS3 from Amazon for $17.99; thanks to second day Prime shipping, the game will be here Wednesday. Sure the game has been out for a year, but that goes a long way to show how much my gaming patters have changed over the last couple of years. There was a time when this one would have been on my preorder list, but to be honest, these days I am so far removed from the gaming community that I assumed this was an arcade game similar the PSP version. Hell, even if was a pure arcade racer, there was a time when I would have had the game in hand on release day, played the heck out of it, offered up some initial impressions, and then go on a 5000+ word diatribe about the game. I digress. Those days are gone.

When I saw the cheap price, I headed to metacritic to check out the game. I am guessing that Ferrari Challenge got lost in the crowded field of other arcade racers – you know the GRID, DiRT, Need For Speed, Motor Storm, and to some degree the beautiful GT5: Prologue. I am going to guess that when everyone figured out you had to work for wins Ferrari Challenge fell by the wayside. Even if I hate the game, for less than $20, I figure that it is not a big loss.

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