The Best F1 Racer for the GBA Thus Far
This is a very solid title, and I have almost zero complaint with it. The graphics are fast, clean, smooth, and clear. The sound (considering the modest GBA speaker) is excellent: The engines sound very real, and are very loud (Stereo headphones make this even better). It has wet tracks, with falling rain, dry races, 17 circuits (all real-life), 11 Teams, 22 drivers (all real) and 4 modes of play (Quick Race, 2002 Season, Custom Season, and Multiplayer.) Battery backup in the game keeps track of Season standings, and fastest lap times. You can use an automatic transmission, or a more challenging manual transmission. It also has a basic and expert mode of racing. Basic gives the opponents a bit less speed on the track, and also gives you a red ! mark at the top of the screen when you approach a turn too fast. The expert mode ups the difficulty by not only making the opponents faster, but by taking away the ! sign for turns, thus making it importnant to know the layout of each track. Control is smooth and easy as well. You have a choice of either 3, 5, or 10 laps. Ten laps is for those who want a long-feeling race, with a feel of realism to it. For a video game (as opposed to a PC game) 10 laps actually takes quite a period of time. I've never actually played a video game that has races as long as this! (The PC version of this game has the FULL laps of the real courses available, meaning races can literally take hours. For a handheld, 10 laps is very impressive!) The only cons I can think of would be that the mode 7 graphics used to render the tracks - while excellent overall - tend to render each track as flat as a board. Real tracks have up and downhill sections, and bumpy sections as well. The only thing simulated here is some bumpiness that you can see. The other negative would be a lack of more track-side objects. Grandstands, trees, and buildings ARE there, but very sparsely placed, and frequently repetitive. Some tracks, which are thickly forested in real life, have maybe 12 trees total in this game. This hardly detracts from the real fun, however, and is merely a technical complaint. Overall, if you want a F1 title with modest realism, and superb play value, this is it - especially with the current price mark of it!
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