- Spoiler: show
Had a blast going through this again. My thoughts are still much as they were here. Great handling model, great aesthetic and atmosphere, really nice laid back game but which rewards pushing your skills too.
I have a few more things to add though. I played the vast majority of this on the Xbox One, but for the last leg I decided to hook up the old 360 and play on that instead. There's a few quirks with the emulated version that in many ways makes the original version a better time. It's stuff I have noticed before, but going through the career again definitely brought them back in to focus in a stronger way. The most obvious is the visual bugs. There's an effect in this game that makes your car look dirty the longer you drive it around, especially with brake dust collecting around the wheel arches. On the XB1 this is broken, and instead causes a weird crazy stripe effect to gradually appear over the top of the car. Not a big deal but kind of distracting, and it turns a neat subtle effect in to something annoying and ugly. There are also some cars where the livery editor is broken, and some parts of the world where the lighting is bugged, like certain road markings that glow pink in the night.
Another particularly annoying thing I got was that I kept getting kicked off Xbox Live every few minutes. But if I stay offline, the game stutters every so often randomly. It even seems to do it more frequently during races, when you really need to be concentrating much more. I think this is a problem with backward compatibility on the XB1 in general though. I've got it with other games, like with Tron: Evolution not long ago.
The big thing though is that the controls feel very noticeably different on XB1. It's way more delicate and difficult to handle on the emulated version. This could be a bug, but I think it's more likely to do with how the XB1 controller interprets inputs compared to the 360 pad. The sticks and triggers are much stiffer on the 360, so it's possible to be more precise with how far you pull/tilt them for small adjustments. But at the same time, I think there's more to it as well. Like the controller registers a lower fraction of input from the triggers on the 360 when they are pulled to the same degree as they might be on XB1. This is something I have noticed with other controllers too, how it is extremely hard to get a gradual progression of increasing input when slowly pulling down a trigger. There frequently seems to be a point where it jumps very quickly. It was an issue trying to get Gran Turismo 6 set up how I wanted for example. But what it means for this game is that on XB1 I find it way harder to keep grip in a lot of cars, which in turn makes the whole game more difficult. On 360 I can drive pretty much any class of car without any form of traction control and compete with Hard AI without too much trouble. On XB1 cars start becoming hard to manage as low as A Class, and on several occasions I was forced to swallow my pride and drop the AI difficulty down just to get by.
It's very strange how such a minor thing can make such a big difference to a game. It makes it obvious how precisely tuned this game was for the 360 controller. But it makes me wonder how much controller choice is factored in to game development in general. I believe it's not uncommon for developers to still use 360 pads while they are working on a game, and I wonder how much that ends up affecting how games feel once they ship. Do developers always know how much a controller can change the feel of their game? Is the general reception or individual experience of a game compromised because it was designed to work with a certain controller that players don't know about? I guess this will all be somewhat platform specific too. I feel like there might be more to this than one might assume.
But that's a very long way from talking about this game now... Anyway, it's still a banger. Still holds up almost a decade later.