The PSN just got alil dirty'er

This weeks dump into the PSN bucket left me with alil smile when I first looked upon it, seeing what scraps Sony has shoveled out for us poor ($) gamers to feed on, I saw the DiRT Demo. Needing for a new racing experience I promptly downloading it and off I went.

First I would like to talk about the name, no more is it "Colin McRae pro rally 6"(or whatever) ... its just simply dirt. Oh wait sorry that’s DiRT. With a lil "I”...? What are we a pop rock band? As cute as they think it looks, every time I look it I just want to hit my forehead, because you know some genius over at codemasters was trying to hard to be cool that day and suggested that they name the game as if alil kid wrote it, and then someone else said "hell yeah" meh. Moving on

so you get 3 vehicles to choose from and each vehicle has its respective course for you to try, a buggy with a open desert'ish track, Citroen C4 with a rally track, and a WRX STI with a rally cross track. So being the Subaru fan that I am, I jumped in that and tried the rally cross. Right off the bat my first impression of the physics is, floaty, hover crafty, hard mounted to the rear camera pole.

I have a really high standard for racing games and its been along time since one has really impressed me with physics, it seems like the Devs just care more about amazing menu systems (get to that in a min) and cool commercials, then the actual game play mechanics. As with most racing games lately the car does not feel connected to the ground. It feels like you can just swing it on a pole that’s mounted in the middle of the car and connected by another pole that’s holding the camera.

Nit picking the physics aside, the game is playable. If you’re not a physics fanatic then you probably wont really notice this. Damage is pretty cool, slamming into a guardrail and having it actually bend is pretty rewarding, as far as the car goes. Well... if a real WRX can take that much abuse and still drive, I'm going for a trade in right now. I couldn’t seem to kill it completely, oh and I tried.

Graphics are pretty impressive, the shadowing and lighting are great and the frame rate runs pretty fast and smooth. I really can’t complain about this part of the game, I mean its not" ZOMG AMAZING!! 1" but its what I would expect from a next gen game so id say they are dead on with what they should be.

The menu system, oh boy...that is a work of art damn. One of the coolest looking menu systems I've seen a while. Very cool I just wanted to flip through pages of the menu back and forth and then I realized "oh ya there’s a racing game here huh?” if only they put as much creativity, time, money and effort into the game enigne as they did the menu. Well then it would have had crappy menus and awesome racing... we wouldn’t want that though! BRING ON THE MENUS!

Id say that I had the most fun in the cockpit view with the Citroen on the tight twisty rally track, it gave a great sense of speed and fear of crashing. Over all I’d say that I’m not as impressed as I thought I would be but that’s not to say it’s a bad game. I was on the fence about buying this but after the demo I think I’m going to wait and see what happens with Sega Rally Revo.

I say ... DiRT demo = 7 of 10 ... but go try it yourself