By Paul Tomlinson
1 January 2001

Well, what can I say? This title was announced in November 2000, and since then it has gained a phenominimal amount of interest, just in these few short months since. Originally it gained a lot of publicity for the graphically excellent screenshots, but how does the rest of the game measure up? This is SimRacingWorld's F1RC review, and we hope you enjoy it.

Getting Started

As with all games these days, installing is simple. When you pop in the CD the installer chooses the best size of installation for you from 46, 394 and 596 MBs. Because I have a large hard-drive, the largest installation was automatically selected for me. Obviously, the more you install, the quicker it loads when playing.

Once the game is installed, it is just a simple case of selecting "play". The Introduction video showcases the tracks, drivers and teams from the 1999 season (which the game is based on), backed-up with music from Garbage. Quite impressive and F1-style which is nice. However, this appears to be the only video there is in F1RC. With Grand Prix 3, you had videos for all sorts of occasions, but with F1RC there are none. Sure, once you've seen the video once you'll never watch it again, but it is a nice touch.

After watching the introduction video, you are met by the menu-system, and this is one of my criticisms of the game. The menu-system is slow, unwieldy and complicated. For some reason Ubisoft thought a "spinning" 3D car would be nice to include, just to slow people's PCs up! It looks pretty, but is completely unnecessary. You also have to choose a driver every time you start the game, which I don't understand the point of. You should just be able to choose / change a driver when you want to, not be forced to.

However, a nice point of the menu-system is "videos" of the tracks. Once you've selected a track, you can play a small video of the track you've selected. The videos are computer-generated graphics showing a lap of the track. This is a small but nice touch, of which F1RC is full off. Also, at the end of the races you get to see a nice little podium sequence, which is a bit of a laugh when you see Michael Schumacher's face on a 3D sprite!

Anyway, once you've navigated the menu-system you are ready to start your first race!

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