Grand Prix Legends - 2 years later

GP Legends might be 2 years old, but it strongly remains the best racing title ever designed, even when compared to most arcade machines!

In fact, *only* the recent Ferrari F355, that requires three monster screens - that try to visually immerse you on the cockpit of the italian car - and uses state of the art physics to model the vehicle's behavior, comes close...

GP Legends is a true milestone, on the history of artificial racing. Unfortunately, many magazine never judged it correctly. Most of nowadays' magazines are money making industries, where time is money and nothing else matters, meaning that reviewers will test a game the fastest they can, and, in some cases, write opinions without even having tested the software (believe me! I've seen it!)...

It happens that GP Legends is NOT EASY. Driving a 1967's F1 car wasn't meant to be easy, because of the extreme engine power and the lack of even basic aerodynamics (no wings!)...

If you are running GP Legends with a digital input device (a keyboard, for example), when you brake you do it with 100% strength, and when you throttle... you do it with FULL POWER... As you might imagine, the car will easily spin on these conditions, so an appropriate control device is a must for enjoying the driving experience!

lf you're using a steering wheel + pedals, you'll still suffer to keep the car on the road, at least until you have some experience. Again, it is not easy for starters - it requires experience.

When GP Legends was reviewed, reviewers had such a hard time with it, that very few magazines rated it with extreme high scores, like the ones they always give to Quake stuff...

Two years are gone, and GP Legends still reigns! Nothing comes close! Try the game on a fast PC, with a great force feedback steering wheel (Microsoft's is superb!) and with a 3DFX video card! You'll think you're dreaming!

Why the 3DFX card? Easy: the game was really programmed to fully exploit the GLIDE API, which is a 3DFX's proprietary graphics language, and though GP Legends supports Direct 3D AND Open GL, the results aren't up to GLIDE level.

Here are some of my most recent performances on GPL. These are laps on the Silverstone circuit @ England, and both are run with the Ferrari, on the *default* setup!

My best lap is a clean 1:30:06... but you can also check a very impressive 1:30:15, achieved under OUT OF FUEL conditions! Really worth a download!

1:30:06 [656 KB] / Ferrari / Silverstone / Qualifying

1:30:15 [597 KB] / Ferrari / Silverstone / Qualifying (no fuel!)

These are zip files containing .rpy replays, that you should place on your GP Legends' replay folder. You can't watch these replays if you don't have GPL installed, but I might do a realvideo file one of these days, for you people who never watched a GPL lap before and are curious about it...

My Alain Prost Racing (APR) subsite has plenty of more GPL files, but they are much older, and the site is demanding a complete revolution, that won't happen so soon, as I've much more important stuff on my hands right now. Still, here is the direct link to the GPL page @ APR.