Dabbled with Sega Rally for PC in the 90's. A few years later I noticed whenever I tried to speak to my older brother on MSN chat he was always set to away "playing rFactor" I had never heard of it, so after asking what the hell it was he told me to visit his community and join up....but I had to own a wheel ! So I purchased the cheapest toy wheel possible and signed up to the league. Bought rF1 and GTL thinking I was gonna be the fastest thing they ever saw....how wrong was I lol It took me days just to master how to get out of the garage without spinning as the league ran a no assists policy. But I kept at it and was rewarded a couple of years later with my 1st ever online win at Oschersleben in GTR2 My sim racing is now something I take really seriously and I have invested heavily in equipment and toys Something the Wife lets me get on with as it keeps me out of the Pub. The problem I have now is all the other titles I try to support just bore me to tears, I can't put my finger on what rF2 does that other sims can't get close to, but my guess is the FFB. I hope to be racing with rF2 for years and years to come and maybe take the Motion cockpit route one day. Just for fun I dug out some old diamonds and some not so gem like lol. View attachment 10968 And my current Seat. View attachment 10969 Funny thing is my Fanatec is currently on its way to Germany as it broken and I am actually having to use my very 1st wheel in my league atm, Its a nightmare, My backup wheel (thrustmaster f430) caught fire last week :/
Codemasters Toca Touring Cars 1 & 2 Then Codemasters started making rubbish arcade racers and still do across the spectrum of their different titles. At that point I started looking around for the real deal, and tried GTR 1 & 2, rFactor 1 and now here I am. I tried various other games along the way too, but the above were the main ones.
Right now I'm on the right thread : Use to make push karts when I was a kid & nearly killed myself a few times on those Various race titles on the Amiga (+few others, I remember emailing them complaining about the lack of feel & flex in the tires lol! , this was before talk of tire models & slip angles !) Then to PC: Gp2 GTR2 Various simbin titles Rfactor 1 Iracing ( since 2011 ) Rfactor 2 Did consider getting into real world racing , have done track days at silverstone + lots of karting! but decided to put some of the dosh into hardware instead ( motion platform etc ) so I can do it in my house! ( thinking back to my globally famous push kart days I think this was the best option now my body is bigger causing the force of inertia to be stronger ) ( do have AC too but really not got into it after giving a good try )
I wanted to race but my parents (like many) couldn't afford me going karting so they bought me a Logitech Momo steering wheel and GT Legends & GTR. But I was always into racing from my first SNES game (Nigel Mansell World Championship), PC games (Igniton, Screamer) to PSX (Gran Turismo, Toca Racing, F1 games). And everytime we went to the movies I spend atleast an hour in one of those Sega Rally machines (or Daytona if the other one was taken )
Hard Drivin was the best, i remember the arcade machine, had a key, a full stick shift, and a clutch, spent a lot of quarters on that machine, lol
when I was a teenager a friend of mine had a pc, he was the only one that had one at the time and on that pc was a game called test drive 1. I remember sleeping over and playing that game for hours, taking turns and hanging out, it was on those big floppy diskets with the hole in the middle, I can still picture the computer the desk and the room like I was there yesterday...the good ole days fast forward and bit to PS1 and GT1. I went to a co workers house after work one day and he had this game and showed me how realistic it was ( you have to pass a drivers test!!) so I bought it and played the hell out that, than Metal Gear caught my attention and FPS's in genreal took my attention away from racing. Fast forward some more.......... Needing more "realism" I did an internt search of "military simulator" and operation flashpoint and arma 2 came up. Now Ive been a console guy for years up to that point and realized that I needed a pc to play arma so I built one (which is the one I currently play on). I was part of a arma 2 league Legion of Sparta which dabbled in car racing on sundays. They played NFS, I bought a G27 to join them for there weekly gatherings and in that box was this copy of Rf1. I installed it but didn't really get into it.....yet.......I found myself wanting to race more and Arma was becoming less important. F1 2010 and dirt were my go to games for a bit I even joined a F12010 league and completed a season with them. Wanting "realisim" I did a search to find the best driving simulators. I whatched a you tube vid of these two guys from inside simracing about must have titles two of them being GTR2 and RBR sooooooo I bought both of those and fell in love with both but RBR was my game. I felt connected to the car unlike any other game I have played EVER. I stuck with those until Rf2 went beta, I bought in from day one and been in ever since. I felt connected when playing Rf2 just like I did in RBR and that is why I stay. Ive built a dedicated simracing rig and no longer play FPS's I am a full time sim racer and will be for years to come. I hope my 1 year old son will like racing like I do so we can race and build rigs together and drive the wife crazy! I never played Rf1 I was intimidated by it (all the mods I guess) so Rf2 being fresh, I could jump on board from the start and ride the wave....which I am totally happy with.......thanks for reaing my post and I hope to race all of you on track some time.. Paul Ceglia SR4L
I am 54, and motor racing is my favorite sport since i was a kid. In the early 80' i purchased a C64 and with pleasure i noticed a boxed game named Revs (was 1985 circa). It was my first "racing sim", and at that time (almost 30 years ago!) it was really a sim! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game) Few years later i moved to Amiga 500, but was very unhappy seeing that a "sim" like Revs was missing on the market. In 1992, reading a video game newspaper preview, finally i had the strong feeling that the incoming Formula 1 GP might be the sim i was searching. In the days of the release, almost everyday i did a visit to the computer shop close to my home asking -F1 GP is out?- The day that it was available i purchased it and was an amazing sim (about 20 years ago). Few days later a friend came to visit me and i showed him "the new toy" ... we ran some races in "turn mode" having BIG fun, so we started a championship, with weekly meetings at my home. Months later was released the PC version, and my friend had a PC so he too purchased the game. The great thing is that the PC version of F1 GP had the ability to race with 2 PC linked via serial port (a sort of ancient LAN). Well, my friend purchased its second PC just to run championships together. We were addicted ... go figure, the PC were in the kitchen table, and my friend, his wife and his daughter had dinners in a picnic table in the living room for years! After a couple of years of weekly meetings dedicated to sim racing we were strongly waiting for GP2, but Papy released Indycar racing, beating Crammond in the time. A new game generation, with textures and better physics, so we forgot Crammond, becoming Papy fans. Indycar2, Nascar2, then the big news: Papy were working to an historic F1 game ... it was 1998 and GPL was shipped. LOL, in 1998 it was an "impossible game" without a Voodoo card and we were struggling ... the physics were fantastic, but the game ran at 15 fps with minimun details! After few days we gave up because it was impossible to play. In 2000, after some time spent with Gp3 and with 2 new PC, we gave again a chance to GPL. Now it was giving good fps (the game was capped to 36 fps) and internet was common, so we searched info about the game, finding an italian online league! The dream came true about 10 years from the beginning of our "LAN" races... racing online! At this point i purchased my first PC and moved to N02 and then to N03, always racing road courses and in leagues. In 2003 i met, in euro late night, some good american drivers and after few months we built our own league, which was very succesfull because its "financial management" and "hardcore rules", attcrating hardcore drivers all around the world. But the "Papy era" was at its end, and the joint venture "Kaemmer/Henry" signed a bad moment in the community ... modders treated ... treating people as David Noonan, a genious who created track great conversion tools with the result to help Kaemmer to make money, was a thing that i never digested, so the "new hope" was the incoming rFactor. A belgian guy who raced in the league that i co-founded was beta tester for ISI and invited me, at the end of 2004, to join the testing team. I have to say that i accepted the invitation with a sort of "snobbery" ... i never played ISI games and when i tried F1 2002 because the GTR mod, i didnt like it at all. Well, in February 2005 i joined the ISI internal testing team and in a couple of weeks i was hooked. rF was great, and were great Gjon&Co too! Now are almost 9 years that i play only ISI sims and i am very happy for the direction taken by ISI in the recent years, trying to build a truly dynamic simulation having a "state of the art" tire model, which is at the beginning of its life and that, i guess, it will last for many years to come, always improving in its features (just like the old tire model born with SCGT and "died" with rF2)
Loop doesn't work in rF2, it was tested some time ago. Other than that I don't see any reason why there could not be Harddrivin mod. Even with the graphics and sounds of it
Reading this thread makes me feel like a novice. I only tried my first sim mere ~4.5 years ago. And it was rF1 . Before that I messed with TDU in "hardcore mode" and older GTA titles with various "more real" car mods. Only with keyboard, then I tried rf and immediately understood I needed a wheel so I bought a used momo and was instantly hooked. Then I believe I was learning pretty fast, about the whole simrace world and how to drive fast. But last 2 years I feel like I don't get any faster anymore, maybe just more consistent. As time goes I concentrate more on immersion and fun and not laptimes cause I won't be an alien never anyway..
My way of thinking after decades a sim stands above the rest. I understand where you are coming from however I do not see it as a problem but a solution. Too many sims, all that has accomplished is to dilute online communities. 10+ years ago I brought every single title. If pCARS and AC were on 90% off special and NON steam I still would not waste my money ( DRIVING TIME ) on them.
Sega Mega Drive Road rash, an Evil Kenevil arcade machine that coincided with first "cigarette". P'd ourselves laughing & ran out of coins. the MS PC Cart game demo with Laguna Seca in it, some oval circuit Nascar game of the same vintage on ancient PC's... THEN.. EA F1 series, all SBK series, rF1 etc etc. A little TOCA here and there, >too kiddyish. ISI rules.. that's final.
My first racing game I bought was F1 2002, I tried some online stuff, met a few guys, and joined a league. I sucked, but I managed to at least finish all but one race, and finished 4th in the championship. Then moved to F1C, then rf1 for our league races.... also bought both GTR games 1 & 2, GTL, RBR, a few arcadish racers too like Toca 2, NFS Porsche Unleashed,Also tried NetKar Pro, LFS, and will probably get AC when it has more features, but now RF2 is my sim of choice.
