Driving with eyes wide shut

Like many people, I'm a big fan of traditional driving games, particularly rally games. But I do have an increasing hatred for their utter boredom.

But I don't think it is purely the games that I blame, I think it is my age and lifestyle that means I just can't cope with them as well as I used to be able to.

I'm nearly 30, married with 2 very young children and I wear contact lenses. My gaming stretches as far as a a few sessions a week nowadays. I still really enjoy driving games but have slowly but surely drifted (excuse the pun) over towards the arcade style games rather than these serious driving sims - simply becasue they are more fun in short bursts.

Grey everywhere

What annoys me most about these sims is the fascination of night races, or races in poor 'evening' light or dull overcast weather conditions - all to make it more 'real'. Even rally games do it loads now. I often literally fall asleep when playing games like this, and struggle to see where the hell I'm going a lot of the time. My eyesight itself is fine - is my brain knackered???

Feeling tired...

I used to detest playing the 24HR races on GRID, simply because I'd be doing perfectly well until dusk set in - I'd then struggle like hell to judge corners and when dark set in I'd completely lose it. Whether it is my age, lifestyle, contact lens wearing or simple tiredness, I just cannot enjoy these moments. Not just GRID, I recently went back to play Rallisport Challenge 2 to see a horrible track playing in the fog. Fog FFS - making the track fooking hard as nails to judge at speed. I'm sure I didn't have a problem when playing it first time around.... am I knackered now??

Watching a new video of DiRT 3, released this weekend, makes me realise how little the rally game has moved on since the early days of Colin McRae Rally on the PS1, let alone the original DiRT released 4 years ago. I know there is only so much you can do to make a rally game different, but why do they have to look & play so.... fucking dull? I was nearly falling asleep just watching the video.

This whole article may read like re-hashed UK:Resistance entry, but give me crisp blue sky, green hills, bright red cars anyday thankyou... at least it keeps me awake.