I treated myself to a new Ps3 game today. Being a long time F1 fan (I remember where I was when Gilles Villeneuve died) I had been looking forward to adding this game to my library since well before we got our Ps3 for Christmas.
First impressions are that I love this game!
For starters – the game is from the 2006 championship season. Kimi is driving for McLaren, Schumacher is with Ferarri and Alonso is becoming a 2nd time world champion with Renault. These years (and the ones with Hakkinen and Coulthard at MacLaren) were some of the best in recent history for me. While Michael Schumachers skills can’t be denied – I didn’t particularly enjoy watching him win year after year after year.
Secondly – the gameplay is realistic. Granted I have all the driving aids on and I probably won’t be shutting them off any time soon. BUT the realism to which I refer is the race weekend experience. You start off with practice sessions during which you can make use of the ‘Evolution’ tuning feature to tune your car. Not being an engineer this works well for me as its like a trip to your optometrist. Car settings are changed (one by one) and you give the system a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the last lap for each test. The end result of this was for me a car that was easily 3 seconds a lap faster than if I didn’t go through the process.
Realizing how long F1 races are, now that I’ll actually be racing them, I am happy to see that you can scale the race down to x% of the actual race distance. The computer is smart enough to suggest pit times taking this into consideration and yes you will indeed run out of fuel if you don’t pit when you’re supposed to 
My only disappointment so far is that (shame on me for forgetting) there was no race at SPA in the 2006 season so it’s not included in the game. I so wanted to feel what it’s like to fly up Eau Rouge with nothing but faith telling you that you can keep your foot plastered to the floor !
I was also pleased to discover that the ITV crew are giving the play-by-play commentatary – primo choice!
I’m thinking I have many many hours to look forward to and I plan on racing along with the 2009 season (to the degree that I can).
