So just because you find driving a powerful car in a driving game to be hard, it automatically is unrealistic? Have you tweaked your wheel settings? In my opinion Nordschleife in GT5 (while gorgeously modeled) is way too forgiving because:
- The car is unrealistically stable over curbs! You can place half the car over the curb and grass and it is still stable. Also, you have to use these unrealistic techniques and attack the curbs at full speed without risk to gold the Nordschleife Special Events.
- The car is unrealistically stable on landing after jumps! You can attack jumps at full speeds without risk while in Shift 2 if you try the same you will surely loose control.
- If you make a mistake in GT5 and slide of course you can keep the power and just get back on trak. Do the same in Shift 2 (without slowing the car down first) and the car will roll!
Also, while racing, GT5 has many unrealistic elements:
- You can use other cars to slow down,
- you can use other cars (by hitting them sideways) to steer faster,
- therefore you don't have to plan your moves to pass them and you just pass them like the obnoxious moving obstacles they are!
- The opponent cars in GT5 are like they have twice the mass of your car! Or like they are scaletrix cars, glued to the track, since it is almost impossible to push them off course (thus allowing the reckless techniques I described above)!
- Also if you make a mistake and crash on a barrier it's no big deal, you just bounce off and continue without losing speed. Likewise there is no risk of rolling your car if you slide of course.
- The AI seem to not be aware of your presence on the track. They bump you when you are braking and crash on you when you are turning. But thanks to the unrealistic and forgiving (and in my opinion awfull and laughable) collision physics of GT5 there are no consequences and therefore instead of racing you are playing bumper cars!
While you may say that you should play GT5 correctly and not bump on other cars, the lack of consequences for your mistakes in GT5 has great effect on your driving. Along with the forgiving physics (I described above) you can push as hard as you want with minimum risk (and almost guaranteed saves if something goes wrong), without planning your moves and therefore you become
reckless! Also the lack of punishment for your mistakes makes GT5
unsatisfying,
unmemorable and also very
sterile!
In Shift 2 pushing your car to the limit is much more intense, dangerous and satisfying since the slightest mistake can have huge race-ending consequences! Also the AI in Shift 2 is fast and if you respect them and try to avoid contact they provide a true wheel-to-wheel experience and you can't relax even when you are in the lead. They become aggressive only when you treat them like GT5's AI! Furthermore, bumping on them usually results in a race-ending incident, so you must plan your moves before passing them.
Therefore, I think that the
representation of driving and (especially) racing is very realistic and entertaining in Shift 2, and much better than GT5, in all aspects:
driving physics, racing experience, fun-factor, etc...***As for GTR you mention, I tried it briefly a long time ago on my PC and found it to be much closer to Shift 2 than GT5. It wasn't easy to push the cars to the limits, it needed both caution and practice, just like Shift 2. Also the mistakes (losing the braking point, sliding of track, hitting the curbs violently) I made where punished by the game, just like Shift 2. I mean in GT5, if you loose the braking point in the second chicane at Monza you can just go over the curbs at full speed and actually gain time! Two times this happened in Shift 2, once I ended on the barried and the other time the rear suspension and chassis of the car was destroyed! It was both fun and realistic!
Admittedly at times GT5 feels realistic. But it doesn't represent the difficulty of pushing your car to the limit and the dangers and the need of absolute concentration of racing since it is very forgiving. Shift 2 offers (in my opinion) a much more realistic and entertaining representation of racing
if and only if you have a steering wheel and you are willing to spend some time to tweak the wheel settings to suit your style and then tune your cars using the excellent live tuning feature!
- for some truly enjoyable offline arcade racing.
👎
), screwed up this and that and whatnot... Its just sad as hell.
