Miguel Sanchez

I have cleansed my palette The Long Good Friday (1980) Mildly contrived plot, overdone music, one or two very television acting performances, brilliant from start to finish.

Project Cars 2 (PS4, 2017) Project Cars 2 is... well, it's a racing game. You drive cars round tracks in races against other cars. I don't like writing about games by comparing them to others, but after finishing the first Project Cars last year and more or less jumping straight into this it seems worth doing. Even if you reading this right now have no idea what I thought about the first game. Luckily, I can be even more succinct than in my opening. I liked Project Cars, and Project Cars 2 is Project Cars but a bit better in pretty much every way. The career structure in the first game didn't make any sense and was very awkward to navigate even when you worked it out. Here, you start off in one of three starter-level classes and complete one season of them. When the new season starts you pick a new championship to compete in. There are six tiers of championships you can progress through, of varying lengths and of increasingly sophisticated or high profile cars/series. In addition to these championships there are Manufacturer Drives, with four stand-alone races each for different manufacturers which you can unlock and participate in whenever you want. There are also Invitational Events, split into five categories offering an even greater range of individual races. You can compete in these whenever you want. The career makes full use of all the game's content, which is a massive improvement on the first game. I finished Assetto Corsa last year and I think I forgot to write it up. This was in part because I didn't really have anything in-depth to say, but I enjoyed PCars 2 for mostly the same reasons. I just enjoyed the physical act of driving. I play with a wheel and pedals and an extremely rudimentary knowledge of the things that affect race cars, and after 150 hours I'm not bored with the game. I don't feel the same sense of completion I do with most games after I've earned the platinum. I could go back to playing this semi-regularly and just be content with it. I could start the game again from the beginning, working my way through and enjoy it just as much. Maybe even more if I decided to make the races longer. It's rare for me to experience this in a game these days, so I think it deserves credit for this. Each circuit in the game has fully dynamic 24 hour time changes and changeable weather, with everything from bright sunlight to snow and fog and storms and track conditions which change accordingly. Like the first game the graphical quality of the cars can vary, but the environment and lighting effects are genuinely spectacular. I think Gran Turismo 5 is the high point for me in terms of actually feeling immersed in time and weather changes, but there's a chance that's because it's the first game where I experienced it. Here though, it always just looks great. The shift from sunset into night is practically worth seeing at every track, just to experience it as much as you can. Similarly, the weather and track conditions changing feel mostly natural and obvious. Dry and wet lines appear accordingly as a track dries or gets wet. Track temperatures play a role in your car and tyre performance (and other mechanical things), and all of this combines to make the conditions as much of a challenge as your car or the cars you're racing against. I said mostly up there because of the problems I had with cars aquaplaning when they hit puddles. I remember watching F1 in the early 2000s. I remember Martin Brundle explaining that aquaplaning happens when there's too much water on the track surface for the tyres to touch it and grip, so your car just skids because the wheels spin and there's no traction. In PCars2, if you hit a puddle you feel as if one of your wheels has fallen off. There's no way to describe this other than to say no matter the car, no matter the speed, tyre, anything - if you hit a visibly wet spot on the track your car will pitch and lurch to the side. This eventually makes certain conditions practically undriveable, and it was wildly annoying. It was especially annoying when it didn't seem to affect the AI, but this is a problem I'll go into in more detail later. I'll happily admit I don't drive and don't know how realistic this is, but it doesn't feel right. PCars 2 is much closer to the simulation side of the racing game spectrum than the arcade side. In addition to the weather and time changes, the level of technical detail in the cars is huge. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about cars, or know anything about the many decades of road and race cars covered here, but you can tune near enough every aspect of a car's performance. There's also a simplified Race Engineer option where you can tell it which parts of the car you're struggling with and it makes suggestions to change the downforce or suspension settings for example, but in my experience this is overly simplistic and doesn't really make much of a difference. As an example, when running an Audi R18 at Le Mans the custom setup I used from the internet made a difference of about ten seconds a lap, and there's no way I could have done that using the game's options. Back in my Gran Turismo 4 days I remember obsessively tinkering with the tuning of the cars I was driving. That was obviously massively simplified compared to now, but even then I just don't think I have the time or inclination for it anymore. I think this is one of sim-racing's biggest obstacles. Any one of the race cars you drive in this game could have hundreds of people involved in its design, construction and maintenance. In a game, the player is effectively given all of the options, a few lines of description for what they do and is left to get on with it. The base setups are largely manageable, but the difference when you use one from someone who knows what they're doing makes it feel like a different car. In my limited experience the sense of community is one of the best parts of sim-racing, but the massive time investment it can be never really stops being daunting. Fortunately, if you don't feel like a crash course (ahem) in engineering before every race, there are sliders to change the AI difficulty and aggression levels. I think I got better at the game the longer I played it, because I found myself able to turn the difficulty up as I progressed through the career. This made me feel quite smug, I'll be honest. One problem here though is how this can vary depending on what or where you're driving. Road America? The AI goes through corners at a pace I just can't. Circuit of the Americas? I don't know how the esses at the start of the lap work but when I try and take them flat I go off road, when I slow down I get punted. The same goes for the rain too. One of the Porsche events has 70s classics racing at the old Hockenheim layout and it's simply physically impossible to drive through the rain at the same rate the AI does. I remember setting the difficulty to 30 (out of 110) and still getting left behind. After the amount of time I spent with the game I largely had a feel for what settings I needed to use to get a good race, but this really seems like one of the game's biggest weaknesses. One other thing to mention here about the career mode is being able to change the length of races. If you just want to blast through as quickly as possible, go to minimum length and everything will be 3 laps or 20 minutes. By the time you reach the final tier of championships you'll be doing 24 hour races, or 90 laps of Long Beach in Indycar. Really, the game can be as engaging and realistic as you want it to be. You can also pit in and switch for an AI driver if you need a break in one of those endurance races, and if anything this is even more tense. I used it a few times and again I was back to watching B-Spec Bob in Gran Turismo 4 and 5, willing him round. It's a bit detached, but you still will the car round every corner. He only hits the other cars sometimes. One of the original Project Cars' biggest failings was the collision physics. Touch another car? You're now glued together and going off track, sorry. This has been changed in Project Cars 2, but sadly the main reason I know this is the AI's fondness for terrible driving. I wasn't on a high difficulty, I wasn't on max aggression, but the AI seemed to love doing things that would get a driver banned for life on pretty much every lap. The amount of moving under braking into a corner, throwing cars into a gap at a corner that's never going to exist, it was honestly remarkable to see. The moving into corners always got me though. I don't know what the inspiration was for this driving style, but I suppose at least if you hit one of them they'd just go off, rather than taking you off with them. The best example of this in my experience was found in IndyCar racing. There's a trophy for driving a full distance, 200 lap race at Indianapolis. The Indy 500. One of the world's most famous races, and with properly licenced teams and drivers the Indy championship is actually great fun once you're far enough through the career to play it. Rather than just turn the difficulty down and coast I decided to try and do the race properly, with a semblance of competition. I'd say it was almost worth the aggravation. Frantically following a leading car to get slipstream and keep your speed up and your fuel consumption down? Well he'll start braking for the pitlane with no warning before he's out of the last corner, so you're going into the back of him and your race is over after 140 laps. Or maybe there's been a crash and all of the AI cars are travelling at 60mph to go around it and by the time you've caught up it's too late to brake and you're out. Or maybe you're side by side going round a corner and the AI will just veer into the side of you and you're into the wall and upside down and two of your wheels have fallen off. I spent so long trying to do that race I actually developed a fondness for oval racing. The level of concentration and precision required is exactly the sort of joy of driving I mentioned at the start of this review. With the variable AI quality this was one of the most challenging parts of the whole game for me. It's just that most of that challenge was trying to anticipate completely unnatural movements. One addition to the game from last time was off-road racing, specifically rallycross and ice driving. There are several contemporary World Rallycross cars and tracks in the game. I can't really drive off-road in games on my setup so I can't comment with certainty, but as far as I can tell it's all a complete waste of time. I've played plenty of rally games with a controller and been fine. Wheel or gamepad though, you just can't in PCars 2. There's no grip, you can't slide, there's just... nothing. You can imagine what it's like trying to race the AI I've just described when you can barely move your own car. I don't understand why a pretty substantial amount of content exists when it feels this laboured to play. Slightly related to this, while the Manufacturer and Invitational events are great career additions, some of them can feel as redundant as the off-road stuff. There's one in the Supercar menu which takes place at the short layout of the Red Bull Ring at worst a lap under a minute. You're in supercars and hypercars - Paganis, McLarens, basically the fastest road cars that are in the game. Conditions are always the same. The race starts early in the morning in the fog, so it's cold. There's not much track temperature, so there's not much grip. Fine. As the race progresses it starts raining. Eventually the track temperature is 33 degrees Fahrenheit or 1 Celsius. The event was so stupid I actually had to convert the temperature and find out how cold it was. The track surface is basically ice, and you're trying to drive a short lap in a car that slides around even if you're in 6th gear. Things like this and the off-road stuff just make me wonder - who designed this event? Who approved it and put it in the game? How could anyone think it was a good idea? Why bother? I played the game with all the DLC so I'm not sure off-hand what was base content and what wasn't, but I know some of my favourite parts were extra. Driving the classic Le Mans and Spa layouts in Porsches, Ferraris and Fords from the 60s and 70s was absolutely as terrifying as it should be. I think I remember watching a Jimmy Broadbent video about this long ago that made me buy the game in the first place, the experience holds up. I think even if you're using a controller, even if you don't know anything about cars or motor racing you can find joy in combinations like this. I think even with the various problems I've described the game hits the right mix of depth and accessibility, with an appeal to people who've never played a racing game in their life or people like me who by now have spent decades with them. There are still things I would improve, but it was still 150 hours well spent.

Is it time to call Prigozhin a baldy fraud yet?

This is back on iplayer. I'm sure I'll enjoy watching it again.

I enjoyed this:

40% of the submarine was of Pakistani origin.

Alex Turner

I'm a bit late for tonight but for anyone going to Bellahouston on Sunday or Tuesday, I live a ten minute walk away and there's basically no extra traffic on my road tonight. If you don't mind an extra walk (although I think it's supposed to piss down both days) you could do that.

Eagerly awaiting the responses from all the Celtic fans who laughed at the BBC being banned from Ibrox* *f**k off, bennett

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) Exactly the same as all the others yet somehow less offensive. I'm just glad I'm done.

I don't think you'll run into one on the way to work.

Hmm, so it was. I think there might have been someone else who was disabled who I joked/mused was famous for being ill.

I think that was based on the famous for being ill premise. An interesting discussion but not one that's going to come up a lot.

I wrote my master's dissertation in a day and a half, cheating would have been better.

"Lowering the pitch" and "taking the screens out" have been on the go for as long as I can remember. Believe it when you see it.

Picking all the members of a particularly hedonistic rock group might work if they had a collective OD, or their plane crashed, or something. Or if Scientology starts showing signs of being a Jim Jones-esque cult.

Shortly before descent:

I'm pretty sure there's a limit on how much you can buy before there are extra charges and it's over £100 something. If someone tags BFTD he'll know.

I'd rather have a square go than, say, travel to the bottom of the ocean in a dustbin controlled by an Xbox controller.

As fun as that would be to think about

BBC coverage of Glastonbury is always a bit weird, but this is just nauseating: Lizzo, Elton John, Rick Astley... Who will give us 'Glastonbury moments' in 2023? - BBC News While I'm here, the word "vibes"

Just in case anyone wants to see the stepson's twitter: Brian (@audioguy182) / Twitter