Formula One: Championship Edition | Toro Rosso STR1 @ Indianapolis | 1:09.7 [RPCS3 Wheel Gameplay]
60Chasing my ghost in the STR1 for a few laps and just showing what it looks like to find time in this game via the ghost car.
Fiddling with RPCS3, and it decided it supported my Logitech G29. Wheel randomly started calibrating itself during the opening splash screen and works flawlessly out of the box. Wasn't aware RPCS3 supported wheels but I guess it does? Or the game is picking up my X360CE config for Forza? This game still has a small yet active community; check out @shzkevin5305 for laps quicker than mine.
Formula One: Championship Edition was a PS3 launch title by Studio Liverpool depicting the 2006 F1 season; first of the V8 regulations, first year on the grid for Toro Rosso & Scott Speed, final year Indy was on the schedule. The game has a distinctly different art style than the Codemasters series which would begin a few years later. There is an obsession with recreating the mid-00's F1 TV package down to the last detail. Color palette is much more natural and some of the motion blur/bloom/light ray effects are just spectacular.
This game IMO drives significantly worse than the Codies games. Visually it looks spectacular which hides how firmly in simcade/arcade territory it actually is. The car is very docile on center due to what feels like non-linear steering you can't remove (not a deadzone, just a ton of play in the wheel). In some corners it feels great and helps you run smooth lines, but others it's intrusive so it's very much a trade-off. There is no saving it once you get sideways, and hitting kerbs can be an insta-spin. The way TC is modelled seems fine.
This game requires a beefy PC to actually attempt a Grand Prix with. The people demoing this on YouTube in 4K are on high-end builds. For all others, it runs fine in time trial mode if you're curious to turn laps.
Part of this game's design was to set time trial in early morning conditions, and you can't change this, which makes the track impossible to see. This can be fixed by going inside the game's files and replacing the dawn skybox and post-process settings (which are clearly labelled tt_postprocess.ini) with the regular race weekend filter/skyboxes. You have to do this manually for each track but it's not a big deal.
I distinctly remember the launch of this game even thought I didn't own a PS3. Was right up there with NFS High Stakes, Madden 2001, Project Gotham Racing 3/4, and the first Shift as games I vividly remember to be absurd visual milestones.