realistic? Er, no thanks performance wise, this game just doesn't seem to run well on any computer i've ever had. first i had a p3 with 512mb and a geforce fx 5200. performance was pretty poor. and i put it down to the hardware i had at the time. since then, i have also had the opportunity to play this game on an Intel Pentium d with 1 gig of ram and a radeon x300. i'm at a loss, as there wouldn't be that many PCs up to this spec in 2002, yet still the performance is not good. no, there's just something not quite right about this at all.
aside from being extremely sluggish in the graphics department, the same can be said for the controls etc. in a big way. this is one of the most unresponsive racing games i have ever seen. people talk about this being 'realistic', but i'm sorry real cars just do not behave like this. you try to turn the wheel all the way round, and yet the car just seems to slowly veer off to one side. very slow acceleration which is highly frustrating. if this is truly realistic, then i'd much rather play super Mario kart, thank you very much.
the tracks are highly boring and mostly just look like any old unremarkable American highway. too much space, to open, not enough sharp bends. oh, i forgot, you couldn't put any sharper bends in, because the car simply wouldn't be able to manoeuvre round them. no, i'm not kidding, you'd probably have to do a 3 point turn. how do these people get off their drives, i wonder?
nope, this game sucks, IMO. if you want a really good racing game, then buy v-rally 2. though, nobody seems to have played it much. and looking around on the net, it's almost as if it never really existed. much the same with a lot of other things in this world, great things get swept under the carpet, while sucky things get high praise