Virtual racing

As a professional road tester, I’ve driven lots of cars over recent years.

But over the weekend, I drove dozens of cars at tracks all over the world. I even destroyed a couple of them.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to pay for repairs. These were not real cars, they were virtual vehicles in two of the hottest new driving video games just released for Xbox 360 – Forza Motorsport 3 and DiRT 2.

On the face of it, the games might seem similar. Both feature real life cars, accurately modelled by sophisticated scanners and programmers, put onto virtual race tracks for us to control. But that’s about where the similarities end. Both are great fun, but very different.

We’ll start with DiRT2, or Colin McRae: DiRT2, to give it its full name. It’s the latest in a series of games using the name of the legendary rally driver and the first in the series to be produced since McRae’s death in a helicopter crash two years ago. A tribute to the Scot is unlocked mid-way through.

As the name suggests, rally and off-road racing forms the basis of this game, but it’s not a re-enactment of the WRC, as previous games were. It’s much more showy in its presentations, with American rally stars like Travis Pastrana and Ken Block taking centre stage and although there is an appearance from Middle Eastern superstar Mohammed Ben Sulayem, there’s no Sebastian Loeb or Mikko Hirvonen. The events too are much more X-Games than Rally GB – a lot of the action features several cars on track at a time, racing around a track. While there are more ‘traditional’ stages, racing point-to-point with a co-driver, it might annoy some purists.

It is brilliant fun, however. Game makers Codemasters have hit a great balance between handling realism without making it inaccessible. So it’s perfectly possible to pick up DiRT2 and chuck in huge powerslides straight away, while still having enough depth and strong enough competitors in the single player game to reward practice. My particular favourite part is a point-to-point blast in Utah, when you find yourself flat out and having to fiercely concentrate lest you hit a rock or lose control at high speed.

DiRT2 sees you take the role of an up-and-coming driver as you tour the world in your motorhome and compete in various events. On the way you race and befriend fellow competitors and generally seek their approval, opening up new cars and tracks on the way.

The graphics are really good, especially the in-car camera, which captures frantic gear changes and reactions on the steering wheel with serious realism. Customisation options let you hang furry dice from the mirror or gaffer-tape a toy to the dashboard as you see fit. A nice touch is that all the voice actors have recorded their dialogue using hundreds of names, which means that after you input your real name at the start of the game, pro drivers personalise their encouragement. Hearing Ken Block say “Hey Phill, you were unstoppable in that race!” is rather pleasing to the ear. And long overdue in my book.

Where DiRT2 is an accessible, arcadey-style game, Forza Motorsport 3 takes a different path and is a serious, hardcore simulator. This delves into motorsport into much more technical depth, and its attention to detail may put a lot of people off, but if you’re a petrolhead and you stick with it, it’s incredibly rewarding.

The game features more than 400 cars and dozens of circuits, all accurately modelled and plumbed into an ultra realistic physics engine – if it happens in a real car, it happens here. Come into a corner even slightly too quick and try and turn, and you’ll understeer. Get on the gas too early in a rear-wheel drive car, and you’ll end up sideways. Where pulling a controlled four-wheel drift is easy in DiRT2, it takes a lot of practice in Forza, although it’s incredibly satisfying when you get it right.

The game can be played with the joypad, but so fine are the tolerances that you’d be better off getting a steering wheel controller – I’ve found it very difficult to make my joypad inputs refined enough to avoid unbalancing my cars at speed.

Almost every aspect of the cars can be tweaked or upgraded. Want more power? You can change air filters, exhausts, cam profiles, engine displacement and more. You can even transplant entire drivetrains from one car to another. A Datsun 510 with four-wheel drive and an 850bhp Nissan Skyline engine? No problem sir. Then you can change caster, tyre pressures, anti-roll bar settings; all manner of options are available to the technically minded.

Of course, if you’re not a tuning wizard or a seasoned driving game veteran, game makers Turn 10 have included plenty of options to get you started. Assists such as ABS, traction control and auto braking can be turned on, along with painted racing lines to follow and automatic gears. If you’re totally hardcore you can flick all these off and put the gearbox setting to fully manual, which requires you to hit the clutch button while changing gears. Get it wrong, and your gearbox won’t last long. You can also upgrade your car automatically, with the game recommending a good set up for you.

The cars range from humble hatchbacks like the Ford Fiesta to fire-breathing supercars like the Bugatti Veyron and Lamborghini Reventon, or proper Le Mans-spec race cars, and all are available from the off, although you’ll need to earn money racing to buy them. You also get given cars as you gain more experience, and before long you’ll have a decent sized garages. All the cars can be customised and resprayed, while an in-game editor allows you to whip up your own custom graphics and logos and add them to your cars or sell them for in-game credits online. Many gamers spend as much time creating and selling paint jobs or tuning set ups as they do actually racing.

The circuits are a mix of the real and the made up. The Nurburgring and the Circuit de Sarthe in Le Mans are faithfully reproduced alongside fantastic, if imaginary roads on the Amalfi Coast in Italy and twisting turns near Mt Fuji in Japan. They all look fantastic, as do the cars, although while the driving physics are astoundingly good, the damage caused when they crash is a little less severe than you’d expect. When everything else is so realistic, this jars a little bit. The animated drivers are also on the dull side – if you have the game view set to in-car, all they do is steer. Gear changes are apparently done by magic.

These are minor niggles however – the depth of handling of the cars is Forza’s real forte, and it’s set a very high benchmark for the long-awaited Gran Turismo 5 ahead of its due release for PS3 next year.

Both games have one highly useful feature for those terminally frustrated by making one small mistake on the last corner of the race - a rewind button. Mess something up and you can hit rewind and try again. You get a limited number of attempts on DiRT2 and infinite on Forza, although if you use it, your time for that lap will be invalidated on the global leadboard. Some may say it's cheating, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

Both Forza Motorsport 3 and Colin McRae: DiRT2 are highly recommended, but for different reasons. DiRT2 is a game that you can pick up and play instantly, whereas Forza demands time and practice but has far more depth to it. Personally, I’ve not played DiRT2 since Forza came along, but if I get bored of fiddling with brake biases and rear wing settings, I’ll be back to the rally game for some instant adrenaline.