Inside Mac Games • MacGameStore.com • MacGameFiles.com • IMG Pro June 30, 2005 Search IMG Pro: Hot Downloads • Watch List • Blog • Preferences • Account Logout Home News Sneak Previews Gameplay Graphics Reader Reviews Reviews 15 reviews. Average Rating: 6.93 Sound Value Hardware Read the reviews • Write a review Features Publisher: Feral Interactive Genre: Sports Mac OS X: 10.1.3 Mac OS Classic: Mac OS 9.1 Forum CPU: G3 @ 500 MHz RAM: 128 MB Hard Disk: 350 MB Graphics: 16 MB VRAM Polls Blogs Chat Total Immersion Racing Developer Journals Pages: 1 2 3 4 Gallery April 2, 2004 | Perry Longinotti Release Dates Custers Desktops Racing games can get boring pretty fast. Usually, you get your pick Advanced Search of the current year's cars and if you select wisely you can run away from the pack immediately. Unlike real-world aspiring Michael RSS NewsFeed Schumachers, you don't have to earn the best ride. Do this a couple of times and suddenly your game is relegated to the bookshelf where it will sit until someone releases a patch with next year's cars and About IMG drivers. Contact Us Recently racing sim developers, seeing this trend of boring racing Advertise games impacting their sales volumes, have begun to include RPG Click to enlarge Help Wanted type elements to games to increase depth and replay value. These range from Codemasters cinematic and Wing Commaderesque Race Change of Address Driver, to EA's recent F1 Season iteration with an elaborate career mode. Racing gamers are demanding more from the games, and some creative products are the product of this demand. Ambrosia Razorworks has developed Total Immersion Racing (TIR) with their take on how to make a racing game last longer and provide a better challenge. You have your pick of 18 different cars spread Aspyr Media across three racing series. TIR is licensed and based on the GT/LeMans racing series. In order to Freeverse sample of the cars, you need to play out a career over a minimum of three racing seasons. Seasons are short ranging from 5 to 9 number of races. GraphSim MacPlay Start with Abt racing and drive their very nice Red Bull Audi TT. If you get immediate results, you can expect to be rewarded with a seat in a more powerful team's car, or a promotion to the next MacSoft higher series. For example, you might end up driving Audi's all-conquering LeMan's car or a V12 Pangea BMW. VP Games TIR includes actual race tracks from around the world. The level of detail on the tracks is as good as you will find in any racing game. Monza is one of my favorite tracks, and I always try this out first in any racing sim. It looks very nice. There is excellent attention to detail and the track was modeled very well. Pages: 1 2 3 4 Gallery Home Reviews Total Immersion Racing Inside Mac Games • MacGameStore.com • MacGameFiles.com • IMG Pro June 30, 2005 Search IMG Pro: Hot Downloads • Watch List • Blog • Preferences • Account Logout Home News Sneak Previews Gameplay Graphics Reader Reviews Reviews 15 reviews. Average Rating: 6.93 Sound Value Hardware Read the reviews • Write a review Features Publisher: Feral Interactive Genre: Sports Mac OS X: 10.1.3 Mac OS Classic: Mac OS 9.1 Forum CPU: G3 @ 500 MHz RAM: 128 MB Hard Disk: 350 MB Graphics: 16 MB VRAM Polls Blogs Chat Total Immersion Racing Developer Journals Pages: 1 2 3 4 Gallery April 2, 2004 | Perry Longinotti Release Dates Custers Desktops Gameplay Advanced Search Gameplay consists of the racings staple modes: Time Attack, Championship, Single Race, and Challenge. All are pretty self RSS NewsFeed explanatory except for the Challenge mode. It allows you to compete in certain challenges that are restricted to a certain type of manaufacturer. Very much like the challenge modes in Grand About IMG Turismo, this mode gives you a bit more replay. Contact Us What would add a lot of replay value, and is noticably absent from Advertise TIR is network play. No AI, no matter how clever, can substitute for Click to enlarge Help Wanted the ruthless tactics of a buddy in a far away land. Online play, and all the fun game extending features that usually come with it (ladder Change of Address boards, online racing series, community) has been left out of TIR. In 2004, that is inexcusable. The game offers the now standard "driving aids" to make life a little easier for bad drivers. The aids Ambrosia really punish you and prohibit truly fast lap times. The computer controlled braking for example is Aspyr Media ultra conservative. Hopefully you don't spend $40 on a game to let the computer do all the driving for you. It is far more satisfying to learn the tracks and master the art of blasting through them. Freeverse TIR does a good job of conveying the team nature of motor sport. The personalities/managers of GraphSim the real life teams are depicted in TIR's still shots as they offer you rides, and encouragement or MacPlay reproachment between races during the season. Having some animated cut scenes or video of the team celebrating wins or dejectedly rolling a car in the garage would have added a lot here. MacSoft Pangea You get some feedback from the pit crew or engineer, but I did not find it very helpful. I would prefer, "You just took 5 seconds from Joe Shmo last lap, his crew is getting ready for a stop. You VP Games have open track, let's take some more time from him!" I think that would be more realistic and far cooler. The key feature is it's "revolutionary AI." According to the developer, computer-controlled drivers all have their own personalities, memories, behaviors and grudges to bear. This means that on track rivals will remember things that you do to them, particularly if you destroy their chances of success. When racing, the drivers all have an emotional state based on their pre-existing characteristics (stamina, experience, judgement, track knowledge, etc.) and also events as they unfold during the course of a race. You can see a visual representation of the other drivers' states during the race. A small icon appears over the other cars and this will tell you how they are feeling. They will either be neutral, aggressive, confident or defensive. Exclamation marks represent a grudge. Grudges can be carried forward after a single race. I played through the three championship series and although my team manager warned me, I never had any nasty incidents with other drivers. I drive pretty rough too, so I was expecting something to happen. Perhaps the effect is more pronounced if you stay in a single series longer. I don't recall racers being promoted with me through my career. Graphics I played the Windows TIR demo on my monster Wintel box and the game looked absolutely stunning. For some reason I can not get the same effect from the Mac version. It is probably due to the newer shader capabilities of the 9800XT in my PC versus the relatively older RADEON 9000 and GeForce2 MX in my test machines. If you have a RADEON 9600, 9700 or 9800 or an Nvidia GeForce4 Ti or 5200 you should be able to see this game the way it is meant to be seen. Very pretty indeed. Even on my test machines, this is the best looking racing game on the Mac in my opinion (the screenshots are from the Mac version). Car models are quite good. Textures are crisp and easy to read. Damage modeling is missing. Sometimes in order to secure licenses for these games the developer has to agree not to depict damage. That may be the case here, but any real simulation needs a damage model. Tracks, as alluded to earlier, look fantastic. We really have come a long way since the old days of Geoff Crammond's World Circuit games. Replays are fun to watch and are almost at a TV-like level of realism. Pages: 1 2 3 4 Gallery Home Reviews Total Immersion Racing Inside Mac Games • MacGameStore.com • MacGameFiles.com • IMG Pro June 30, 2005 Search IMG Pro: Hot Downloads • Watch List • Blog • Preferences • Account Logout Home News Sneak Previews Gameplay Graphics Reader Reviews Reviews 15 reviews. Average Rating: 6.93 Sound Value Hardware Read the reviews • Write a review Features Publisher: Feral Interactive Genre: Sports Mac OS X: 10.1.3 Mac OS Classic: Mac OS 9.1 Forum CPU: G3 @ 500 MHz RAM: 128 MB Hard Disk: 350 MB Graphics: 16 MB VRAM Polls Blogs Chat Total Immersion Racing Developer Journals Pages: 1 2 3 4 Gallery April 2, 2004 | Perry Longinotti Release Dates Custers Desktops Audio Advanced Search Audio is an important part of the gaming experience. Music is a big part of this, and while the tunes in TIR are good, you won't be RSS NewsFeed humming them after playing this game. Engine sounds are very important, and here Razorworks did their homework. Redundant engine noises can quickly detract from an otherwise decent About IMG experience. The in-game sounds were not really impressing me much Contact Us until the first time I had a Panoz LMTP come right on up to my bumper. I would go as far as saying that this is what sub woofers Advertise were invented for. The deep throaty grumble of the big-engined Click to enlarge Help Wanted prototype was a real highlight for me.