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Review

Team F1

8.8

Format PC

Developer EA Sports

Publisher Electronic Arts

Genre Unknown

13-Aug-2001

Formula One manager games, eh? There are loads of them. Actually that's a lie, there's one but we won't go into that here, especially as Duncan MacDonald's about to have a look at the brand new Team F1.

How would you (yes, you!) design an f1 managerial game? If you're into the subject matter you'll doubtless have thought about it at one time or another - I know I have. What I'd personally do is this: first I'd make it possible from the outset to hire a computer-controlled underling to do all the managementy stuff. This would leave the player free to enjoy the other parts of the game, which would involve buying and driving loads of different sports cars (a la The Need For Speed); hanging out with jet-set people at parties (but with weapons, a la Quake); buying an island and building a really flash house (Sim City style); a bit of golf with Sean Connery and Nigel Mansell (Links); and, of course, zooming between various celebrity events in your private 'stunt jet' or helicopter (Flight Unlimited, Apache Longbow). Come race weekend you'd simply have the results faxed to you, wherever you happened to be. (Unless it was the Monaco Grand Prix, of course, in which case you'd be watching the proceedings from the flybridge of your 185-foot mega cruiser yacht... surrounded by loads of bikini chicks, and having a chinwag and a g&t; with the Sultan of Brunei (who then gets very pissed and admits that your boat is better than his).

Team F1, however, doesn't take this tack at all. You actually have to work. Yes, work.

Work? Oh no!!!

Yes, and it's damned hard work, too. Team F1 is the sort of game in which it's sometimes wise (if you've got a crap memory) to have a notepad and pencil nearby. But I'm running ahead of myself. Instead I'm going to ease you in by starting with the game's difficulty options.

Okay, Team F1 opens with the 1995 season and you can opt to take the managerial role of any of the teams involved. Select further options and you can even begin the game with every single thing sorted for you - from sponsors to suppliers, from staff to drivers (and beyond). But if you're genuinely interested in playing an f1 management game, I'll hazard a guess that you'll be wanting to start with nothing. Which, of course, you can.

That's not very realistic, though...

Yes, I know. After all, if I walked into my local tsb and told the manager I was intending to start an f1 team, and that all I needed from him was 20 million quid, the words in which he'd reply would rhyme with suck and toff. In the game, however, the one asset you do seem to have is the fact that you're extremely credit-worthy; and you have a choice of approachable banks, to boot. Time to muse at length, then.

But wait... While you're sitting in the sim bank like some sad bastard, poring over all the anoraky interest rates and stuff, there's a timer ticking away. Team F1, you see, is against the clock. EA call it their 'real-time system': a moniker which isn't strictly appropriate, because an hour passes in a matter of minutes. (The upshot being, of course, that time spent between race meetings had better be spent wisely.)

So what do you do next?

Right, we've started the game, got a 'package' from the bank, and now it's time to click, click, click. The main game screens are static images of the inside of your office, your mechanic's workshop, your stores and so on - all with numerous hot-spots. Essentially, you navigate between these screens as you see fit, but at the very onset of

Team F1 in this 'do it all yourself mode', logistics tend to dictate the order of the proceedings (after all, you haven't even got any staff yet, let alone drivers). So, clicking on the team portrait on the wall, you bring about its enlarged full-screen image. From here you hire (and, incidentally, fire) your crew: the pen pushers, PR people, pit crew, mechanics, chief engineer and so forth. Hot-spots akimbo plus loads of profiles to go through too, and all with the clock ticking away. Still, some of these people are going to be giving you advice later in the game, so it's worth doing well.

Three 'game days' later and you've got Bob from Croydon Autos in the workshop, a PR person who looks like Peter Sutcliffe, and a pit crew who all suffer from Parkinson's Disease. Still, who gives a toss? The fun part is about to begin. In other words you've got to choose a driver.

Super-chin and Sour-Kraut...

Coulthard's contracted to Williams and Schumacher's contracted to Benetton, obviously (this being the 1995 season and all). You can offer them a carrot for next year if you like, but then again they may not even want to talk to you. The way to approach Team F1 is to think of yourself as a leper. So which drivers do you attempt to attract? Easy. Other lepers. To this end you reduce the size of the mammoth driver list at the click of an icon, leaving you with only the unknown drivers. Didier Blurdeblur? Let's see. Well, he's married with five kids (not good), he's 49 (not good either), and he's never made it into a Formula One team in his life (oh dear). If I was to mention the fact that he was a millionaire and would actually pay �200,000 for the honour of a drive, would that make a difference? Not bloody likely. Next!

Actually I'll just quote from the manual at this point: 'The drawback of the menus, especially in the transfer market, is that you have to go through a whole range of information. But sadly it's not possible to reduce this volume of information as this would simply reduce the reality of the simulation, although it would probably make the game easier to play.' And that's a fact. But they have a valid point.

If I had room I'd outline all the decision menus in depth, but for the sake of finishing the review before the page ends it's probably best that I just plonk down some words...

Research and development. Spare parts. Pit crew training. Driver training. Engine testing. Wind tunnel. Office expansion. More testing. Time and motion. Sponsors. Bonuses. Holidays. Warehouse expansion. Overtime. Merchandising. Insurance. Manufacturing contracts. More testing. Clock running down. Slightly confused. Where am I? Graphs. Over-sensitive mouse. Why did my engine explode? Industrial espionage. Calendar. Gear ratios. Calendar. Try different brakes. Calendar. Refit. Calendar. Refit. Calendar. Clock. Panic. Aeroplane.

Race weekend!

Piss! I've missed testing. Still, better to miss testing than qualifying, especially as my single car (it's so much easier to have just the one) has qualified brilliantly (for a leper) and is going to be eighth on the grid. Yahoo! Time for another hot-spot session that takes me into the team caravan where the final 'driver talk' is on the cards. I tell him to finish in 6th place at the very least, and I then pop to the pit stop strategy screen (which is very user-friendly by the way).

There are three viewing modes for the main race: fast, medium, or slow. Select 'fast' and the computer whizzes through its calculations, giving you the final result in about ten seconds. Select 'medium' and you get a bird's-eye mini-map view of the track with dots (ie the cars) moving at the rate of about five seconds per lap. But select 'slow', and a visual treat is in store... true to life courses with abundant camera angles. Yes, that's your car. And it's got Gerhard Berger up its arse. If this was F1GP or IndyCar you could take control yourself, but it's not. You can, however, send the odd (very odd, actually) radio message. Tell your driver to pit, for example. Or to 'get out of the slipstream'. Strangest of all is the command 'overtake the car in front'. Er... but he'll be trying to do that anyway, won't he? Maybe I'm missing something. Regardless, watching races from this real-time viewpoint is cool. Until it gets boring, of course, at which point you can switch to the speeded-up overhead mini-map. It's everything that MicroProse's Manager wasn't, basically. (Even if the Team F1 cars do drive on the grass occasionally, and are sometimes visible through solid structures. Oh well.)

Dazed and confused

Team F1 takes an age to get to grips with, and to begin with you often don't know why you're doing what you're doing. In fact I still don't know what I'm doing half the time. Nevertheless, when you get things right, it's a real buzz. An addictive buzz, moreover, which spurns you onto the next race. And the next. And the next.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning the in-race commentary, which is superbly duff - it's so incredibly bad it's nothing short of bloody hilarious. Top marks. And there's something else, too: Team F1 is a German product, which made me wonder whether they'd succumbed to the obvious temptation to programme in any bias toward Michael Schumacher. After extensive tests, it would seem not. However - and I admit that this could be a total coincidence - I did notice that the Austrian drivers tended to fare rather too well. Er... Hitler was Austrian, wasn't he? Z