Aight Bradshaw, I'm waiting on ya. No one else at Inreview plays Grand Prix Legends, you are going to have to show up and get this thread rolling dude.
Maybe this will help.....
I race Mike on a regular basis. I get better and better, but that poor guy never grows. I like to call him Skid Master, cause he can't keep it on the track.......
maybe not. I've been reading the fat kid with gas section!!! That was hilarious. Well, I'm going to go to Bill and Amy's now and help Bill with his songleading - don't tell anyone. I wouldn't want to embarass him at all. See youse tomorrow. I may be online later.
Grand Prix Legends was released by Papyrus/Sierra, in 1998.
It was a formula one racing game set in the year 1967. Cars back then were far different from the Formula One cars of today.
The reason I like the cars so much is that they are just plain fun to look at. In 1967, there was no advertising on the cars. So you had a clear clean paint job. The tires were huge and fat. For the most part, the engines were not covered, but exposed to the open air for the eye to see.
The game itself, graphics wise was super lame. If you popped in a brand new copy of Grand Prix Legends into you computer today, you would eject it right away and trash the c.d.
The game had something else that computer race sims of today do not have.....a realistic physics. I don't know how they did it, but it feels like you are driving the real car.
And it's hard to do. Even after 6 years of driving the cars in this game, I still spin off the road from time to time. It feels like you are in a real car though and it's addictive.
You can peel out, do 180's, feel the power of the engine turning the tires, drift, and crash the car with extreme prejudice.
Did I mention that I love this game?
Then something wonderful happened. While Sierra pretty much abandoned the game, the GPL community took over the game and started making massive graphics updates. These were just normal people making no money off of the game, they simply loved the cars and the feel of the ride, and put their own time and effort into making it a better game.
Hundreds of websites sprung up on the net, some giving the cars a better tire, some a better cockpit. Some did entire remakes of the whole car.
Graphics wise, the cars are the best in the world of computer sims at this point in 2004. (The tracks and scenery are still sub par, but the cars more than make up for it.)
Here is a shot of the a typical car cockpit from 1998:
Camera Control Master, another labor of love done for the GPL community, enables anyone to edit a saved game replay so it looks like it was professionally filmed. With CCM you can fly high above the race action or fly close to a car to see the awesome suspension detail that is absent from the race simulations available today. A favorite camera location can be fixed and made one of the 9 default camera angles to cycle through when watching a replay.
The amount of graphics and sound additions that have been made available by those who love the game is staggering!
Some of the best places to find enhancements or links to them are: Grand Prix Legends Editor's Association (GPLEA), the Grand Prix Legends Track Database, and also the Racesimcentral Forums.
If you are tired of all the race sims or driving sims that are way too easy and cheat you out of a real driving experience, get on ebay and get Grand Prix Legends.
A word of caution though, once you play it in all its updated glory, you probably won't have much use for your old racing games. Also, don't try to drive a real car right after you play a GPL game, you might end up in a ditch.
01-23-2004 09:55 PM
