CART World series

I've heard that it is an amzing game and am now considering getting it. Any one heard of it? You think it is worth it? If played, how is the damage model?

I got this last week.

I haven't had chance to play it properly but from what I have seen so far I was a little bit disappointed.

Firstly the game only contains 10 tracks. These are mainly ovals I think with only 3 or 4 road courses.

Off the top of my head, the road courses are Laguna Seca, Long Beach, Mid Ohio and Vancouver. There may be another, I'm not sure.

The game is based around the 1996 or 1997 season so the Long Beach track is not much like the current track.

There are only 15 cars in each race. Not sure why 15. Seems a strange number that. Anyway, drivers are all from 96/97 so there are drivers like Zanardi, Vasser, Andretti, Fittipaldi, Boesel, Matsu****a, etc.

My initial impression of the graphics was that they were OK. They compare favourably with other games of the period (ie, not dissimilar to F197) but don't stand up all that well against some of the newer games.

The sound isn't all that great, especially on ovals. A wider range of engine noises would have been nice.

So, to the game. I started the game of Rookie level (the lowest of 4 difficulty levels) as Greg Moore at Homestead. The car felt pretty good as I started my 4 lap qualifying run. Qualifying completed and I am last on the grid, about 10 seconds off the pace. Surely something wrong there as I was doing clean laps. Fortunately you can change the car set up between the qualifying and race (and actually redo qualifying if you want.)
I didn't bother changing the setup, thinking that the car would automatically be better in the race. It wasn't. The race started and everyone just drove away.

Tried again and took a load of wing off the back and started the race from the back again. Managed to gain a place into the first corner but got hit from behind, spun into the wall and was out. It took me about 3 or 4 goes at it just to finish the 4 lap race and even then I was well off the pace.

So basically, it seems very difficult to start with, which may be a bit offputting. I am going to stick at it and hopefully it will become better the more I play it.

I think that the game certainly has potential, but it is going to take some time to actually get into.

I don't think I can really rate the game just yet, but will do so when I have played it quite a bit more.

Oh, regarding the damage... this was one of the bits that I liked about the game (so far) although it would be nice to be able to switch it off. The game does have an arcade and a simulation mode - I may have only been playing on the sim mode so will try out the arcade mode this week. It may be that if you play the arcade mode for a while then the sim mode will seem a bit easier.

Damage I suffered included losing wheels and wings. A nice feature was that if you lost a wing, it remained on the track for the rest of the race. Not sure if it was possible to damage the car further by running over it though. I also ended up on my head quite a bit on the ovals for some reason - usually when I spun into the wall and got hit by an oncoming car.