After setting up my PSN account, I tried to purchase a game using a credit card. Denied. Contacted credit card company – nothing is wrong on their end. Based on SONY forums FULL OF USERS COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS VERY PROBLEM, I then began a ridiculous game of trying to get my billing info to work with my card. Note – the EXACT same information from my billing statement was not working. Giving up on this card, I tried another card with another bank. SAME STORY – exact information from billing statement did not work with the card. Because of my multiple attempts at this silliness, I was locked out of my account for 24 hours.

SONY CANNOT TAKE CREDIT CARDS?

I called CUSTOMER SERVICE. Customer service was only able to repeat the same instructions as on the forums. I asked – “Can you at least remove the hold on my account so I can continue this game of trying to guess the right billing info to make your system work?” The answer is no. I then asked – you must be working with a 3rd party then for billing, can you please give me their contact information so they can resolve it. Nope – Sony runs the system, but their agents can’t help. So after a call to support – I have to wait 24hrs for the opportunity to fight with their horribly flawed system AGAIN. I asked what to do if that doesn’t work – well, they say, “You can buy SONY cards”. How is this a better solution than FIXING a KNOWN user problem? Furthermore, why are their customer service agents completely unable to help?

This is entirely unacceptable. How long has PS3 been around? Why can’t they fix their system to accept credit cards (like every other online service)?

Because I purchased my system primarily for downloadable content:

I NOW OWN THE MOST EXPENSIVE BLUE-RAY PLAYER ON THE MARKET. (And I didn’t want a blue-ray player in the first place.)

I hate to say it – but if I wanted good support, I shouldn’t have purchased a PS3. BE WARNED BEFORE BUYING.
Rating: 1 / 5

1) You’ll probably need to buy another Move Controller, so that’s another 50 dollars

2) The Bundle doesn’t come with a Move Navigation controller, So I guess that’s another 30-35 dollars

3) You’re not going to buy a PS3 and just play the Move; there aren’t that many games out yet. Eventually you’re going to want to buy another PS3 Controller and a game or 2, which lets say is 75-100 Bucks at Least.

Well it certainly is a Good deal, but are you really going to enjoy a PS3 with this kind of deal without paying lots more money?

I don’t own a Xbox, and I’m a future owner of a PS3, Not this bundle though, I’m getting the PS3 160GB, for a cheaper and funner experience.

Update: I already own a PS3. So Cross out the “future” part.
Rating: 2 / 5

Ignore the reviewers who said this is a Simulation game – they are mistaken and I can only assume they have never played a proper Simulation game such as Forza 2 or Gran Turismo 5, instead they are comparing it to other pure arcade games. F1 2010 is NOT a Simulation game, it’s a Semi-Simulation game – everything is realistic (such as the speed of the cars for example) apart from the handling which is arcadey (unrealistic). The game was promoted as being a Sim, I read that the developers had learned from the past mistakes with the previous crappy arcade F1 games and that they were going to do it properly this time and make a Simulation game. To the people who may say my rating is unjustified – if I buy a game expecting it to deliver on it’s promises but it doesn’t and I sell the game because I don’t like it as it’s not enjoyable for me then why would I give the game anything more than 1 star?

In an official video I watched, the former F1 driver Anthony Davidson said that they were trying to make a game which was as close to real-life as possible while still allowing people to play it. If they made it exactly like real-life then nobody except real pro-drivers would be able to play it – all console games do this such as Forza 2. However F1 2010 didn’t do this – instead they just gave the game arcade (unrealistic) handling.

One aspect of this Arcade handling, is that F1 2010 doesn’t seem to recognise fine inputs on the analogue stick when braking and steering into a corner, it seems like all that’s required, is for you to hold the stick all the way to the left or right – I wore the skin out on my thumb trying to wrestle with the car. All I can say is that it feels like I’m driving an extremely fast tank instead of an F1 car! Even if you tune your car properly the car still have arcadey handling.

This was in the Amazon description: “Simulation Racing: Every aspect of Formula 1 is replicated in exacting detail, but less experienced racers can still choose to play in a less serious arcade style mode”. There is no Sim or Arcade mode you can only choose what driving aids you want, even if you turn the aids off this won’t change the fact that the handling is arcadey. If you’re an above average racer and accelerate and brake with the triggers I’ve been told that you might as well drive with the aids off as you won’t even notice any lock up or traction problems.

You have several preset control schemes to choose from (you can drive with the A button to accelerate and the X button to brake if you want) and you can use the wheel if you want. You can’t reprogram the controls. Here are the driving aids of importance:

ABS: On or Off

TCS: Off, Low, Medium or Full

Braking Assist

Automatic or Manual gears

Driving line

Graphics

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To the people who say the graphics are brilliant – are you blind? They’re acceptable but not great. Yes the CARS look good (apart from the jaggies on the metal bits connecting the front wheels to the car) but everything else you see (the road and the scenery) looks slightly worse than Forza 2 and you get jaggy lines on the white-chalk boundary lines of the road (unlike in Forza 2). This game says it’s 1080p but I tried 1080p and 720p and found they both looked the same. I also can’t quite put my finger on it but there may be something wrong with the frame rate – the picture doesn’t feel that smooth – it feels slightly jumpy.

Single Player Mode

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The single player career mode is a lot of fun, every aspect of a real race is what you can experience in this game (although you don’t get breakdowns) and the game can be as detailed as you want – you can even choose short races or full distance races and you can skip qualifying, etc and just do the main race. It’s very immersive and almost makes you feel like you’re in a real race. If you’re a fast driver it’s possible to win a race in a slow car which would be impossible in real life. The game gave the impression that when you start with a slower team, you’re given realistic objectives like “finish 15th” in a race. So I expected to have to struggle to get to 15th and it would be impossible to get above this position (just like it is in real life), however I found that I could get far above that and even win a race. You don’t have to do anything special, just outbrake the AI drivers to overtake them (they brake way too early).

The A.I is intelligent enough to not ram you off the track and it will act like real life drivers do, however they post slow times as mentioned above. Also the qualifying the times shown for the A.I drivers are fake, they drive much slower than this.

The race interviews have bad voice acting, they are bland and uninspiring and an interviewer’s voice isn’t in synch with his lip movements.

When starting the game you can select the difficulty (such as the driving aids used, damage, etc), however I don’t think this changes the speed of the other A.I cars, it just changes which assists you can use and you can still turn the assists back on at any time.

You can’t save replays and there is no telemetry. If you mess up a corner you can rewind to re-do it however you can only rewind to within the last couple of corners. Sometimes you can’t control the car when you resume and you’ll go flying off the track.

Tuning

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When in your garage you can go to your engineer who will tune your car for you. You would expect your engineer to give you the best possible setup for the track but this isn’t the case. You get bog-standard tunes (although the gears seem good), you have to choose which setup you want from several preset tunes based on the track type (wet, high speed, handling, etc). You’ll want a low downforce setup for tracks with long straights and a high downforce setup for tracks with few straights.

Annoyingly, you can only save 5 tunes per car even though there are 19 tracks in the game and you also have the option of racing any track in the rain so that’s another 19 tunes you need. I also found that when I saved a setup, when I went to load a setup on another track, my previous setup didn’t appear so I couldn’t load it. You have to write down your settings so can create the same setup on another track.

If you don’t know how to tune then these pre-set tunes will be OK for you (think of it like a default setup). When tuning the car yourself you can tune almost everything that you would expect but the tuning is basic, for example rather than being able to select the precise amount of downforce you want, from 0-900 lbs you can only choose a level from 1-11. In Forza 2 I’m not very good at tuning but in F1 2010 I was able to tune every setting on the car to create a perfect tune in only a few hours which got me to number 1 on the scoreboard for Suzuka.

You can NOT have only 4 gears on a car if you want (for example) because every gear has a preset minimum and maximum speed that can’t be changed so you have to use all 7 gears.

Multiplayer

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Basically you can do Time Trial, System link or Multiplayer races – you can’t paint cars, share tunes, view replays of other people’s times (or even your own). Stupidly there’s a scoreboard for Wins (this isn’t a 1st person shooter for goodness sake! All you have to do is get more wins than anyone else to get to the top. Anyone can get wins if they play the game enough and pick and choose who they play against – this is not a good measure of skill. A TrueSkill rank leader board would have been better – so you only gain rank if you beat someone of a similar or higher skill than you.

Also, why show us how many wins a player has, when we don’t know how many starts those wins were accumulated from? Look at this example:

Driver A – 301 wins from 1000 starts

Driver B – 300 wins from 400 starts

Driver B should be on the top as he has a higher win percentage than Driver A.

Time Trial

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This is for practicing a track or for posting times to the scoreboards. The cars act like they have fully warmed up tires at peak grip, etc so you have nothing to worry about and you can get on with setting a good time. The penalty system is very fair, you can over cut rumble strips and it won’t penalize you as you will see in my video. This allows you to attack the track without fear of getting a penalty unlike in Forza 3 which penalizes you for touching a blade of grass!

The scoreboards aren’t very good, when looking at the scoreboard for a track you can only see the Gamertag name, time, car used and whether someone has used “A” or “S” (whatever that means). You can NOT download tunes by selecting someone’s time then select “Download setup” – you cannot share tunes. You can’t even view a replay of someone’s time although you can race a ghost of your own time or another player’s. However the ghost is practically useless, it really is like a ghost – you can barely see it. It has a mind of it’s own, sometimes it’s just solid enough for you to see and sometimes it’s invisible. There is no scoreboard to see who has the best total time for every track.

If you mess up a lap you don’t need to continue racing until you reach the end of the track in order to start a new lap. You can just click restart and you get a flying start (as if you had exited the last corner of the previous lap at full speed) – this is a real time saver. Rewinding is only useful for learning a track as it will invalidate your lap time (won’t get posted to the scoreboard).

Online Races

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If you just want to race online, you don’t need to waste time with the Single Player, all the cars are unlocked and there’s no upgrades to buy so you can just race straight away. There is a maximum of 12 cars on a track instead of 24 as in single player. You don’t get lag. The only thing I like about multiplayer is the fact that there are 12 cars instead of 8 and you have public lobbies.

You have “Quick Races” (a few laps) and Custom Match (public lobbies). The Quick Race types put you in a random lobby (like Matchmaking but it doesn’t match you with people of a similar skill) and you’re given a random car (which changes after every race). The public lobbies allow you to view all the lobbies or you can select 1 or more of the following things to view only the lobbies you want and you can then select the lobby you want to join:

Session Scoring: Per session or Championship (players can set up single races or multiple races).

Track Selection: Any track or whatever track you want

Race Distance: 1 lap, 3 laps, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 75%, 100% (this is full distance like in real life)

Car Performance: Any, Equal (the cars are all balanced to have the same performance as each other), 2010 (each car is as it’s real-life performance).

Participation: Any, Race Only, Qualification & Race.

The equal performance thing is stupid, what’s the point of having different cars if they’re all going to drive the same?

Annoyingly when setting up a lobby you can choose other settings such as Driving aids allowed, etc but these aren’t available when you’re looking for a lobby to join so you’ll spend a long time scanning through the search results just trying to find a lobby that you like. And it seems that only the host can be a certain car, everyone else can only choose a specific car if nobody else in the lobby has chosen it yet – so you basically get a random car.

Players can vote to boot players or skip tracks which is stupid as they’re all real world tracks so why should people be able to skip them?

There is a ranking system so you can see the rank of another player while you’re in a lobby but it’s crude, you gain XP (Experience points) simply by finishing within the top 10 of a race (there are only 12 people in a race), the higher you finish the more XP you get. XP contributes to your rank. The problem is that you could beat someone of a much lower rank than you and you still gain the same amount of XP than if you had beaten someone of the same or higher rank.

You seem to spend AGES waiting for a race to end or begin – this along with the fact that you get put in a random car is why I didn’t want to play online anymore. You join a lobby and when everyone readies up the “race” starts. After the usual loading screen of about 30 secs (for example) instead of the race starting you’re in your garage and can tune your car or load setups. The problem with this is why can’t I tune or load a setup while I was in the lobby?, this would have saved 1 minute of time wasting.

After about 30 seconds the race starts but you still have another 10 secs or so of watching the automated “driving onto the track” sequence and the lengthy traffic light system to endure. After the race ends you have to wait up to 2 minutes for everyone to finish the race.

Video

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Here’s a video of my world record at Suzuka, just search YouTube for: aHuVkJU12q0

Note the graphics look better in this video than what they do when you play it on a TV (I have a 37″ TV). This is because videos always look better when you reduce the size of them. Trust me though, everything I said about the graphics is true.

Here’s a video which sums up what simulation drivers think about the game!: Search Vimeo for “Hitler reacts to F1 2010 by Codemasters not being a true simulation”

Here’s the video where the developers lie about the game having Simulation handling (particularly shameful is the former F1 driver), just search YouTube for: C_sTJnZwrIk

Unfortunately the only realistic Simulation circuit racing game on a console is Forza 2 and Gran Turismo 5. Forza 3 is a Semi-Sim although very close to a sim and F1 2010 is a Semi-Sim with Arcade handling.

If you don’t like this game you should be able to get a refund from Amazon – just say it’s false advertising to say the following things in their item description:

“Simulation Racing: Every aspect of Formula 1 is replicated in exacting detail, but less experienced racers can still choose to play in a less serious arcade style mode”. The handling is not exactly like real life or even remotely similar – it is arcade like and there is no game mode to choose from.”

“All the cars, all the stars”. You only have 12 cars to choose from when racing online.
Rating: 1 / 5

Oh yes, it delivers the thrills and excitement we all have been

yearning for in an F1 game. For your first time experience with this game set aside a couple of hours play time. You are not going to want to leave the cockpit of your F1 car until you run out of gas.

Lets start with the graphics. They are so good that you forget about them after the first 5 minutes as you

are too busy living the life of an F1 driver to notice. Your heart is pounding and your nerves are fired up

as you anticipate the next series of curves living life at 200 mph.

How is the handling? Im using the basic Logitech Driving Force GT wheel and find the experience to be sometimes overwhelming. Why? Because it takes skills to control these F1 cars at 150 mph plus and you feel that every time you take a curve or accelerate to overtake other cars. Part of the fun is figuring out how to make your car perform at top speeds and the game provides this in spades.

There are lots of cars and tracks to chose. Lets hope this game catches on and they provide more tracks and cars to download.

Is it worth the admission price of your hard earned money.

Yes, and your buddies too! Using the online part of the game you guys can compete with all the other F1 teams from around the world.
Rating: 4 / 5