F1 2009 PSP Review

Oh God, it's a game review- and, well, considering how often I write reviews, you're probably thinking that the game in question is Horrible. You're right.

It's apparent to most people that I am an F1 fan. In fact, I've outlasted most of the people around me who are also F1 fans. Most of them have been pissed off by the FIA's recent rule changes, or the dropping of certain races, or the current stock of paranoid drivers, or the recent outright cheating involving not one, not two, but three major teams. Despite all this, my interest in the sport has grown a lot over the past couple years, and I've been looking forward to a new F1 game since I got the very well done Formula 1 Championship Edition (PS3) in 2006.

Before that, I used to play F1 2002 on the PC- They are both Very Good Racing Sims. Very difficult games, but that's to be expected when you're trying to simulate the pinnacle of motorsport. In F1 2002 I only managed to win once- and that was after years of many races on the same track (Indianapolis) - in F1 Championship Edition I'm just now starting to be a championship contender, four years after the game was launched. This is the kind of difficulty that's expected. A good F1 game, heck, a good racing game in general, should be designed to be difficult. I mean, when doing the real thing, one slip and you're dead.

F1 2009 is certainly difficult to play- but that's because it sucks, not because it was designed well.

I had high hopes for F1 2009- but realistically I knew over a year ago that it was going to be horrible- because that's when I heard that CodeMasters had been awarded the F1 license. CodeMasters games have a long history of being very, very close to being good, but having a few fatal flaws (usually with respect to the actual driving feel of the cars) which make the whole game pointless. F1 2009 is no exception.

Upon firing it up you are immediately faced with your first challenge- how to navigate the menu structure as efficiently as possible. Why? The menus themselves are no more cryptic than TOCA 3's menus (which, is to say, slightly-below-average), however the sounds made when moving your selection around are the most annoying sounds in the entire world. It's a cross between the sound made when adding coins to an old arcade machine and large cymbal crash- And it happens Every Fucking Time You Touch The D-pad. The rest of the in-game sounds are pretty much on the same level. The KERS sound is a bit nostalgic, though- it sounds EXACTLY like using a 'turbo' in the old arcade game, Outrun.

After you get your name entered and move down the line a bit you can pick a track and a car. The tracks are pretty well done, they look like something you'd see on a budget PSP racing game. The cars look like they were taken from F1 Challenge (1995- Sega Saturn). Sure, they are licensed cars, and they are painted up right, but the models look Terrible. And before anyone says I'm exaggerating the terribleness, here's a video of gameplay.


But hey, this is a racing game on a portable, right? The graphics can't be that good! The hardware can't do it! Oh, nevermind, I forgot about Gran Turismo. Polyphony Digital has to be the bane of every other developer's existence.

Anyhow, back to F1, where we remind ourselves that graphics are not as important as driving feel and other simulation accuracy points. Surely, as with some other driving games, F1 2009 has traded off graphical prettiness for driving feel and excellent physics!

Sorry, no.

The cars are undrivable. Utterly and entirely. You cannot take the car right up to the edge and push it around the corners. Why? Because, the controls are horrible. If you jump in with the driving assists off, you simply must drive slow because it is impossible to drive smoothly. If you drive with the assists on, the car basically drives itself, meaning that instead of playing a racing game, you get to watch a computer-generated representation of an F1 race that looks like it could have been renedered on a Sega Saturn.

Still, you must be thinking, you can't blame CodeMasters for all of this; The PSP does not have any analog buttons- the gas is either on or off, the turning is either on or off. The PSP does have an "analog stick" you can use for steering, but if you've ever spent time with it, you've noticed it's not really analog. It's just a d-pad with three positions, off, half-way, and full. So it doesn't get you much.

Certainly, any driving games with these kinds of control limitations are just impossible to make fun because you can't relay any fine-tune feel to the player.

Sorry, no. Gran Turismo drives great using the exact same controls. The PS1 versions of Gran Turismo also drove great, with digital controls. There are countless other racing games which were able to make do. F1 2009, no.

I do think that the developers were aware of these control problems, though, because they seem to have adjusted the speed of the other cars in the game to match. The default AI difficulty and speed is laughable. On my first race, I went from Last to 6th in Two Laps- while driving a Force India, likely the slowest car in the field. This wasn't due to my insane driving prowess. It wasn't due to my car being extra special and cornering well.

It was due to the AI cars slowing down on the straights to let me catch up and pass them. Simply unacceptable.

Other high points? Weather? Damage modeling? Just take the above lack of quality and apply it to any other area you're thinking about. The game is garbage.

All of the above being said, though, it will sell well- because it's the only game in town. As usual, specific sport licensing has pushed us into a corner of buying substandard crap or having nothing at all. I, for one, prefer the nothing.

Metacritic says this game is a 68 out of 100. Don't believe them. It's much. much lower.