Volume 25 — November 17, 2006

By: Che Chou

From the editor's desk

Happy Friday and welcome to another Turn 10 Weekly Pitpass Report — a little column we throw up each Friday to celebrate the end of a work week and the beginning of a work weekend. I've been writing these for the past 25 weeks or so and if you'd like to get caught up, check out the rest of them here on our archive page. If you've got any questions for Turn 10 or just comments about this week's Pitpass Report, I encourage you to air them out in our comments thread (linked at the bottom of this page) via the FM.net forums.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to put up the the multiplayer designer and livery system developer interview I said I wanted to last week for Forza Motorsport 2's livery editor. After discussing this with Josh, our global product manager, we've decided to hold off on this until later. There's enough craziness going on right now, what with folks getting shot, stabbed, mugged, and otherwise getting completely ripped off for some videogame console out there, and the glut of good games getting released in the channel, we figured we'd wait until things mellowed a little before we made any features announcements. The good news is that we feel the new livery system features are cool enough they're worthy of standing on their own in terms of coverage.

Anyway, moving right along to the results of our mid-week tournament...

The Rotary Import Shootout

Open to any Mazda RX-7 or RX-8

Tsukuba

Final 10 Lap Race Results

Although the winner's circle here looks quite similar to all the previous tourney winner rooms we've had in the past couple months, this week saw some new faces in the fray. Newcomers Snophox, Highmark 9090 and Ry Takahashi put up a decent struggle for the podium but ultimately, sx240 (the Russian Rocket) was just way too good — again. Not to worry folks, he's promised to bow out of next week's tournament to give everyone a chance at winning!

Turning Into a KontrolFreek

This week also saw Forza Motorsport 2's game director Dan Greenawalt playing with new ways to control his driving game. Donnie Walker over at KontrolFreek sent us a couple of his prototype analog stick adapters that snaps conveniently to your Xbox 360 nub. The point of this adapter is to give the player greater ease and comfort in driving games where you mainly move the analog stick in left or right motions. Dan got his KontrolFreek on and came up with these impressions:

"Everyone knows it can be extremely difficult to control a racing simulator with a gamepad. One thumb, a three centimeter thumbstick and about one centimeter of travel just doesn’t provide as much fidelity as a steering wheel. It takes a lot of manual dexterity to precisely modulate such a small control — especially when controlling a simulation engine like Forza Motorsport 2 with its physics running at 360 frames per second. Most players are reduced to tapping the control, thereby reducing the control to little more than a digital gamepad. Can you imagine driving your real car at high speeds using only digital inputs – full lock right, full lock left, wide open throttle and pedal through the floor braking?

"Recently Che gave me an odd-looking piece of plastic that snaps onto the Xbox 360 gamepad thumbstick head. This accessory for your accessory is meant to increase the controllable surface area of the thumbstick. Basically, it’s a better lever. While I "got" the theory immediately, I was skeptical about how effective it could really be.

"After using it for the better part of the afternoon, I’m convinced. While it’s no replacement for a good racing wheel, it’s a remarkable improvement over an unaltered thumbstick. I’m able to roll my thumb across the control and use the raised walls to manipulate the control much more precisely. It just feels natural. I’m always struck by how some of the most meaningful innovation is often the most low-tech improvements on an old idea.

"It’s a shame about the bright green color. The Xbox 360 controller is a nice piece of industrial design. Pardon the pun, but this thing sticks out like a sore thumb.

"Here’s the bottom line. This thing is cheap and small. If you don’t mind looking like a dork using it, it will make you gamepad racing experience much better and probably drop your lap times as well."

So there you have it folks. Turn 10's audio test lead and racing cockpit afficionado probably won't be trashing his setup any time soon, but this is pretty cool. Something to pick up for a stocking stuffer perhaps, or even for yourself if you're looking to improve your analog stick experience.

In Rotation at Turn 10: The Games We're Playing...

Everywhere you look, there's hysteria for videogames. When we're not heads down crunching the hours for Forza Motorsport 2, Turn 10 folks are gaming as well. Much of the gaming is contemporary of the times, with pockets of us doing Gears of War deathmatch by night and others tending to their gardens in Viva Pinata (this seems to be the game that just keeps on giving). Still, being racing fans at heart, we also keep a pretty regular rotation of Xbox 360 racing games on-hand to play at the office.

Project Gotham Racing 3 remains as vital a racing game to the Xbox 360 platform as ever, even a year after its release. The game is still, hands-down, the best racing game on the platform, and remains the bar for all other racing games to beat graphically this generation. We pop in this game fairly often but most recently were impressed with the fact that PGR3 launch day memories of the game were not tinted with rose-colored glasses. PGR3 looks and sounds as awesome as it did last November. If you need a little reminder, do check out Bizarre Creation's photo-mode contest thread on their forums for some mindblowing images. But yeah, do let me know if there's currently a racing game out there today that looks better than PGR3 — because you're not likely to find one.

Most everyone has finished their stint with Atari's Test Drive Unlimited. Dan Greenawalt came away rather impressed with the fact that TDU was able to toy with his weakness for car lust, shooting shivers down his spine when he went car shopping at dealerships all over the island. Then there's Need For Speed: Carbon, which for myself personally, doesn't feel quite as focused as the hectic and excellent Most Wanted last year. Still, all of us here were pretty much blown away by the game's auto-sculpt feature that let you create your own bodykits for your ride. Finally, a couple of us still revisit MotoGP on the 360, mostly due to the fact that there are so many motorcycle riders and fanatics in the office. All of them agree that the game is very far removed from the realities of riding a motorcycle, but remains a fun challenge nonetheless.

Also recently released on Xbox Live Marketplace is Ubisoft's latest Rainbow Six: Vegas multiplayer demo. For the faction at Turn 10 that digs shooters, this one is a dream come true (particularly for co-op maven and multiplayer designer here at Turn 10, Bill Giese). Hmm, the graphics in multiplayer aren't as detailed as the single-player demo released a few weeks ago, but the cover-and-fire gameplay remains as excellent as ever. Definitely download and check out this free demo when you get a chance this weekend. Besides, what are you currently playing? Let us know in our comments thread!

Peace out — and just remember — a PS3 isn't worth dying for.

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