F1 Challenge '99-'02 allows players to begin as a rookie driver, earn licenses, compete for cars, join a team, develop racing skills, and race for the world championship. Users can create their own racer -- customizing items like helmets -- or choose from established Formula One stars. Redesigned F1 gameplay includes improved AI, realistic accidents, and option screens available during a race for car adjustments. Players will receive real-time feedback from their chief mechanic and team boss during a race.
Jun 13, 2003 - F1 Challenge '99 - '02 doesn't offer a four-season career mode like F1. On your car's handling, and after a few practice laps on any given circuit, you. The car setup options gradually by first presenting you with a screen that.
F1 Challenge '99-'02 crams a lot of sim nirvana into a sleek package. As its name implies, it flaunts four seasons of Formula One racing, including the drivers, cars, and tracks from 1999 to 2002. Therein lies the first caveat: You can emulate dozens of drivers and race tons of tracks, and you can play through an entire season for points, but the game lacks an ongoing 'career' mode -- don't get it confused with EA's upcoming F1 Career Challenge for PlayStation 2. It's not a big loss, though, because there's still plenty to do.
Although it's a driving game, F1 Challenge '99-'02 is closer to Microsoft Flight Simulator than it is to arcade driving ditties like Midtown Madness. It offers a staggering amount of adjustable options to help noobs and satisfy grognards -- everything from breaking aid in the turns, a fully automatic transmission, and clutch assistance to a plain-old insane amount of vehicle adjustments. The only way to ultimately master this game is to practice. In fact, several practice runs are built-in before each race; you can skip them if you wish, but it's foolhardy to attempt a race without intimately knowing the track.
Realistically, the pavement on most of the tracks is streaked dark along the optimal line, giving you a clue of where your vehicle should be at any given point. Little touches like that round out an outstanding graphics engine. The look of the game is darn near photorealistic; the cars and tracks are beautifully modeled down to the tiniest detail. Paired with these eye-popping graphics is ear-popping audio. The engine sounds come from real recordings of F1 cars, so it's not surprising that they sound accurate. The audio includes Doppler effects, which you can hear best from a stationary, trackside point of view.
The game overflows with realism, right down to ad space 'purchased' by real companies. You might see a bridge over the track adorned with the Michelin man, the Bridgestone logo on the tires on your car, a Toyota billboard, or some other advertisement. Sure, it reeks of as much commercialism as a Tomb Raider movie, but in doing so it makes for a very lifelike experience.
Your car is as responsive as you'd expect an F1 roadster to be. We tested it with both a Saitek Cyborg 3D Gold joystick and a Thrustmaster NASCAR Pro Force Feedback driving wheel. While keyboard controls are also offered, the only way to get the most out of this game is to employ a good driving wheel -- a force feedback model if possible. The game makes excellent use of forces, from momentum changes while rounding corners to vibrations when you slip off the track and cruise over grass or gravel.
It's easy to slide off the track. The physics model in F1 Challenge '99-'02 is obviously the product of tender lovin' care and endless testing. Screaming down the straightaways emotes a breathtaking sense of speed. Learning how to take the turns is tricky, and it's easy to spin out if you wait too long to downshift or hit the brakes. On that note, the damage model has to be inspired by actual, gut wrenching crashes. There's an option for invulnerability, but with it your disabled vehicle explosively hemorrhages parts if you hit a wall or wrap it up with another racer.
Tearing up the track is only one component of a successful race. You're also encouraged to come up with a strategy concerning how many pit stops you'll make and what will be done during each one. During long races you'll need fuel and tire changes to keep up the pace. Tires do wear, and there's a noticeable difference in the handling of a car with cold tires versus race-temperature tires.
Full of caring touches and a microscope-like attention to detail, F1 Challenge '99-'02 is the ultimate thinking person's open-wheel racing sim. It's too bad that EA's not planning any successors, but with a full four seasons worth of racing, this sim might have the stuff to keep you on the track until another publisher picks up an F1 license.
People who downloaded F1 Challenge '99-'02 have also downloaded:
F1 2002, Grand Prix 4, F1 2001, F1 Racing Championship, F1 Championship Season 2000, F1 Manager 2000, F1 2000, Grand Prix Legends
F1 2002, Grand Prix 4, F1 2001, F1 Racing Championship, F1 Championship Season 2000, F1 Manager 2000, F1 2000, Grand Prix Legends
We take a high-speed trip back in time with EA Sports' latest Formula 1 game for the PC.
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The sport of Formula 1 has changed a bit over the course of the last few years. Drivers and teams have come and gone, rules have been altered, and some of the circuits have even undergone design changes. Electronic Arts' latest Formula 1 game--as its title suggests--features accurate information not only for the current season, but also for the three previous seasons. F1 Challenge '99 - '02 doesn't offer a four-season career mode like F1 Career Challenge for the PlayStation 2, but it does allow you to climb into the cockpit of no less than 44 different F1 cars from the stables of 14 different teams.
Before playing F1 Challenge '99 - '02 for the first time, you're required to create a player profile that'll keep track of all of your race statistics as you progress through the game. It seems a little strange that before you're presented with a game options screen, you're required to choose which season you want to race in and which driver you want to race as, but these choices determine the appearance of the subsequent menus, and switching to a new season or driver simply requires you to edit your profile. All the in-game options screens are color-coordinated according to the team you've chosen, and you'll immediately have access to a model of your chosen vehicle that can be rotated manually in real time, should you wish to inspect details such as sponsor logos, the name of the tire manufacturer, or even the plank on the underside of the vehicle, before taking it out onto the track.
You'll probably want to get your chosen car onto a circuit as quickly as possible once you've navigated the various menu screens, and thanks to Electronic Arts' numerous driving aids, you can do just that. The driving aids available in F1 Challenge '99 - '02 include steering assistance, opposite lock assistance, braking point assistance, stability assistance, spin recovery, invulnerability, auto shifting, traction control, antilock brakes, pit lane assistance, and clutch assistance. With all the aids turned on to maximum effect, the game requires you to do little more than accelerate and turn the wheel. This is a good way to start playing, and as your confidence grows, you can choose to either increase the intelligence of your opposition or make things a little more difficult for yourself by switching individual aids to a lower setting or off altogether. It's a shame that no training mode or series of license challenges have been included in the game for novice players, but the driving aids make for a mild learning curve, and they have the added bonus of allowing you to drive competitively the moment your first race gets under way.
F1 Challenge '99 - '02 can be comfortably played exclusively with the keyboard, as the visuals and audio do a good job of providing you with feedback on your car's handling, and after a few practice laps on any given circuit, you should be more than ready for the qualification and race ahead. There are quite a lot of controls for you to remember once you start ramping up the game's difficulty--such as letting your team know that you'd like to make a pit stop, and then activating your rev limiter manually when you go in--but initially you'll be able to get by with just steering, accelerating, and braking.
The opposition in the game seems quite intelligent for the most part, although we haven't really been able to study their movements closely enough to know whether or not individual driving styles have been replicated successfully. As your own racing skills improve and you turn more and more of the driving aids off, F1 Challenge '99 - '02 also affords you the opportunity to get involved with your car's setup. Like with the driving itself, the game allows you to become involved in the car setup options gradually by first presenting you with a screen that consists of nothing more than four sliding bars representing downforce priority, balance, gearing bias, and suspension stiffness. After experimenting with different setups in this way, you can eventually attempt to optimize your car's performance by tweaking everything from radiator and brake-duct sizes to tire pressures and rebound damping. It's not strictly necessary to go that deeply into the car setup options to win races, but if you're out to set record lap times or take advantage of the game's multiplayer mode against friends, there's every chance that doing so will improve your times to some degree.
As far as the visuals are concerned, F1 Challenge '99 - '02 looks very impressive. The circuits all look extremely realistic, the car models and textures are incredibly detailed, and the overall presentation of the game is of the quality that fans of EA Sports games have come to expect. Perhaps our only criticism of the game at this point would be its lack of different gameplay options--notably of the career mode being incorporated into its PS2 counterpart--but if you're after a realistic F1 racing game, it's difficult to see how you could go wrong with F1 Challenge '99 - '02. Every aspect of the four racing seasons covered by the game has been re-created in detail, including the very same weather conditions that were experienced in real life--which pretty much sums the game up at this point. F1 Challenge '99 - '02 will be released later this month.
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