It’s often said that breaking a mirror earns you seven years bad luck. If this is the case, Codemasters seem to have escaped lightly as every single mirror in Race Driver: GRID is utterly broken. I thank them for at least trying to include functional mirrors on the cars in their (arcade) driving simulation. However their implementation is so poor as to actually shatter the illusion that the rest of the game does well to create. The problem is that on the surface the graphics in GRID are very impressive. And while the game makes really impressive use of smoke, its mirrors leave so much to be desired.
In GIRD whenever you look in the mirrors – which is often given this is a racing game – you see a version of the game world which has been stripped of any beauty. I can’t be sure exactly what is rendered differently, but I suspect it’s a combination of lower resolution polygon models and also lower resolution textures. Maybe the lighting is different for the images seen in the mirrors as well. It’s really jarring to see the low quality of the scenes seen through the mirrors as opposed to the relatively high quality of what you see out of the cockpit.
I suspect I’ll have more to say on GRID in the next few weeks. It shares a lot of the issues that concerned me about Colin McRae: DIRT. That makes me worry about F1 2010, which is bound to use the same engine as both of these games. The mirrors in GRID are symptomatic of the occasionally odd decisions made in the development of these otherwise very good games.
Have you got Forza 3? I bought it yesterday. It’s awesome!
Can’t say I do. I’m quite interested, but I really should play more of Forza 2 first. Saw you playing it earlier and I was going to ask you about it.