Colin mcrae dirt 2 install#

When you’re free to tilt the camera as the game loads, flick through your Trophy progression via your notebook on your desk and browse the ever expanding collection of liveries in real time you can’t help but feel like everything the game creates around you is real. I don’t want to labour too much on this, but it does help to form a certain tactile connection with the game. Everything, from the introductory magazine showing some of your friends and their latest achievements, to selecting your next event from a map and then choosing your car from a little brochure is done with such detail and confidence that using a static screen in the future just won’t feel the same.

Instead, Colin McRae DiRT 2 puts you right in the middle of a worldwide multi-discipline tour and keeps the fourth wall well and truly at the back of your mind.

Colin mcrae dirt 2 install#

This might seem frivolous and rather arrogant at first – and on the PS3 at least this three dimensional approach might well constitute a good proportion of the hefty (and mandatory) install – but it actually serves a particularly important function: ensuring the player never feels like they’re just playing a game.

Yes, Codemasters have been here before with GRID and the earlier Colin McRae title, but this time they’ve built a virtual tour bus and parked it in a virtual race meeting and then done away with everything that used to call itself a ‘menu’ putting you, in first person, right in the mix. Remember when videogames used to have menus, option screens and level selects all built from dull blocks of text? Recall the time when loading screens faded to black and prompted you to “wait”? Hardly distant memories – there are games released this very week that subscribe to the same formulaic approach to interface design that we’ve been perfectly happy with since the early 80s – but today, everything has changed.