teh Forum

Test Drive Unlimited just got released for the PC, and it sounds like it's a modern version of the old-style NFS games. Long exotic roads, nice cars, and not too heavy on the sim aspect. Sounds (and looks) quite good to me. May look around for a test copy today, and if it lives up to what I've been reading, I'll go pick it up.

Let us know. Could be good to have a nice updated NFS without all the street racing.

Yeah, I get tired of the street racing. I actually beat NFS Carbon for whatever reason. It was actually pretty fun, but definitely not as cool as long winding roads with better cars. I mean, who mods out a Porsche GT2 (besides maybe the Ruf family.)

Anyway, yeah, I'll post when I've played it.

I tried it out briefly on my living-room PC. (which is definitely not pokey, but not quite high-end or X360 powerful)

It's a Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2-667, Audigy 2, 7600 GT system, designed mostly to hold a lot of media in mirrored form. (this is what we watch most of our shows, cartoons, and movies on)

Anyway, it just happens to be decent for games too.

Test Drive Unlimited runs ok on it in SDTV resolutions. I could turn most of the graphical features all the way up, or close to it. The game starts out a bit slow. You rent a car when you get on the island. Drive it to a real-estate agency, buy a house, then buy your first car, and start driving around. This is about as far as I got. The controls needed some tweaking for me to be happy with them.

I need to adjust steering sensitivity, and for some reason the analog triggers on the X360 pad wouldn't map to gas and brake. Now that I'm used to using these, I can't really play very well without them. (before I was more of a digital gas and break sorta-person)

From my brief look, it seems like it's going to be fun, but I'm definitely going to be doing all of my playing on my main system, as I'll be able to crank every single option to maximum and have it fly along silkily in resolution the X360 can't dream of.

I'll give a slightly better account of it after I get some actual playing in, and get some of the controls worked out the way I like them.

Captain Spidermonkey and I gave it a slightly more extensive whirling the other day. It seems fun. You have quite a bit of freedom (meaning you can drive up into the jungle if you want. There are still a few minor complaints that most driving games seem unable to fix. Running into a hedge will stop your car dead. I never liked that feature. Just make them like grass. You drive through the bush, some particle-based leaves fly up, and you continue on your way. If you need to block an area off completely, I recommend concrete, rocks, heavy fencing, etc. We also didn't like not being able to take out a chain-link fence. Otherwise, it's pretty cool. You can pretty much go anywhere on the island(s) (not sure how many of the islands they modeled)

Anyway, definitely worth playing I think.

Why is it in the NFS world (Carbon at least) that cars are so squirrley in drift challenges, yet so stable on other races? Bothered me a lot.

It's Exxxxxxtreme drift.


I didn't like it either.