Recent Purchase: DiRT 2

Hi there people! This evening, I decided to break the cycle of my trilogy with a short and quick blog to inform you all of my recent purchase: DiRT 2. The game was at 75% off on Steam for the weekend deal and although I am not such a big racing fan, I still could not resist the $10 price tag after trying the demo.

So far, so good. The game feels great all around, be it for the amazing graphics, stability of the controls and how smooth it runs, or even the great gameplay experience, it simply feels great in every department. Even the personalities found in the game will share a good relation with you, if you work it out a bit by racing against them, that is. DiRT 2 seems to offer a variety of tracks along with a lot of different cars, each of which you can unlock additional skins in order to change their looks. I've personally been racing with the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, which is the second car I purchased within the game.

I like how you are allowed to rewind time and start again when messing up. Not only does it give me a chance as an amateur in the genre, but seeing your crashes in reverse is quite amusing as well. Of course, you are limited in the number of times you can use such a feature and as you raise the difficulty, the less times you can use it during a race.

I certainly am not disappointed by the game and it lives up so far to what I've heard of it, hopefully it'll last me a little while while waiting for a new WipEout HD add-on. One thing for sure is that I can't wait to see it run with DirectX 11, especially that my next card (that I'll be buying this month) will support it. Not only that, but I'll also have a 24" monitor by then, which will make all of my PC games much more worth it.

As I said, this is only meant to be a short blog to say what I've purchased instead of being a gaming rant as I often do, and so I have prepared a small video for you people. The video is rather simple and consist only of one of my replays during a Rally, one of which I finished first. I played it on Casual difficulty, which might be why I finished first. While I'm usually not so good at these games, it's been quite easy coming in first on Casual, therefore I'm thinking about moving on to a more serious difficulty to add some challenge.

The video could have used a better frame rate, but in full resolution with settings maxed out, it lost some frames along the way. Fortunately though, the video still seems to run smooth, which is a big surprise to me considering a lot of my Touhou games will lag and slow down considerably although the games are only in 640x480 natively. I guess my PC doesn't like being spammed with thousands of bullets at a time.

Hopefully you guys aren't too disappointed by the lack of a complete rant/border-line review, I'll be keeping this for a next blog in the near future with a different game. Oh and please, bear with the clumsiness that might appear when I'm racing, I'm still a rookie :]


DiRT 2: Croatia ~ Chapel Run