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Zhou Guanyu, a post-99 young man from Shanghai, China, will officially join the Alfa Romeo team in 2022, becoming the first F1 regular racing driver in Chinese history and creating a new history of Chinese motorsport.
FiA Formula 1 World Championship (F1), is the international motor sports federation (referred to as FIA) held the annual series of track racing events, since it was first held in 1950, has developed into the world's highest level of racing competition, each year through live, television, network to watch the game up to 60 billion people, together with the Olympic Games, The World Cup and football and known as the "world's three major sports events".
Although motorsport is not a popular sport in China, but the amazing speed charm of F1 has still gained a lot of fans, especially since 2004, the new China station competition held in Shanghai has given many fans the opportunity to experience it up close, and now with Zhou Guanyu about to play in the 2022 season of F1, let the Chinese people really participate in this global popular project, it is bound to bring motorsport to a new climax.
As the top speed experience on the earth, it is naturally also an excellent theme for video games, and the development of game software and hardware has also played a positive role in promoting F1 events, and today we will review the classic formula racing games in history.
In the 1980s, with the Brazilian Piquet, Senna, the French prost, Mansell and other top drivers took turns to be king, F1 entered a golden period of development, when Japanese drivers failed to achieve good results, but the racing engine produced by Honda gradually occupied the dominant position in the arena, F1 sports quickly became popular in Japan, while the home video game industry boomed, F1-themed games also naturally appeared.
First of all, on the arcade platform, Namco launched the Pole Position in 1982, in the form of 2D simulation, to achieve a racing experience of deep picture performance, players can race on the famous Fuji track, there is a time limit after the game starts, each lap can be completed to increase the time, the car automatically accelerates, in addition to the steering wheel to control the left and right movement, there is also a shift button to switch high-speed high and low-speed LOW, straight driving with high speed, difficult corner with low speed, It's easy to get started. Although the game only has one track to experience, the vivid pseudo-3D graphics, the excitement of racing at high speed, and the large cockpit-style frame that were rare at that time still brought a huge shock to players, attracting many racing enthusiasts to coin round and round driving, and the constantly updated lap leaderboard also made people feel quite accomplished.
When you see the graphics and operation of this game, I am afraid that another familiar work immediately comes to mind, yes, the next thing to talk about is one of the legendary games on the FC console: F-1 Race, Chinese commonly known as "Grand Prix".
"Grand Prix" was released in 1984, and the programmer in charge of the work was the late former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata (Satoshi Iwata), a 25-year-old talented programmer who used the limited functions of FC to restore the thrill of the main perspective of high-speed racing. The game caused a sensation after its release, eventually selling 1.52 million units, a feat that was not surpassed by GT Racing until more than a decade later. The game cartridge capacity is only 40KB, and there is no special chip assistance, so it also appears in many assembled cards, and is well known by many domestic players.
This game still uses simple arrow keys + two speed switching operations, the biggest evolution is to increase the number of tracks to 10, from the initial simple loop to the later complex curves, the game content is much richer than the previous Arcade version of Namco, becoming one of the must-have works for early players of FC.
"Grand Prix" at that time FC console can only single-layer reel weak function conditions, the use of Raster Scroll (horizontal cutting) technology to cleverly achieve a pseudo-3D effect, simply put, is to cut the screen into several horizontal bars, so that the horizontal movement speed between the horizontal bars is different, giving the player the illusion of background layered movement. After the great success of this technology in Grand Prix, many later FC action games were also inspired to achieve richer graphics.
Now look at this game is not a real F1 game, because there is no official authorization of F1 events, no matter the car and the track are just similar, there is no top driver, but the game name and cover are still scratched, to see the similarity with the real game screen, no imitation is strange. It is estimated that the F1 official saw this game and turned a blind eye, coupled with Nintendo's reputation as the "strongest legal department", hehe.
For a long time after that, whether it is an 8-bit machine or a 16-bit machine, it does not have a real 3D polygon function, and for F1, which requires a very high level of real restoration, it can only use the form of 2D simulation, so there has been no obvious breakthrough in F1 games, and as Japanese drivers began to emerge in F1 races in the nineties, players began to have a higher pursuit: top screen + F1 official authorization, new F1 games are coming out.
Until 1992, Sega launched the revolutionary arcade game "VR Racing", the first time let people appreciate the charm of 3D polygon games, followed by the launch of the F1 licensed game F1 Super Lap in 1993, the real restoration of the content of the 12 teams at that time, coupled with the refreshing operation of the double basket, quickly praised by players, unfortunately this game was not transplanted to the home machine, affecting the popularity.
Soon the home console came to the 32-bit era, the 3D polygon function made developers feel like a tiger, and soon there was a well-crafted F1 game, which I had played for several years, also from Sega, called F-1 Live Information (F1L), released in November 1995, exclusive to the Saturn console.
As an arcade veteran manufacturer, Sega knows how to simplify the complex, condense the most attractive parts of the car, so that players can get the most refreshing experience in the simplest way, compared to the traditional racing games in the past, F1L will drive the real racing driver of the F1 racing car as the core of the game, is the key to success.
There are 5 drivers to choose from in F1L, first of all, the representative of Japanese drivers at that time, Katayama Ukyo, as well as damon Hill, Jean Alessi, Mika Hakinen, the three veteran tough players, and finally the Michael Schumacher we are very familiar with, these big stars have a stronger attraction for players than racing, and they have a strong sense of substitution.
There are a total of 6 tracks in the game, of which 3 are original city tracks with different difficulties, suitable for newcomers to practice, after getting started, you can challenge 3 official restoration tracks: Suzuka in Japan, Hockenheim in Germany, Monte Carlo in Monaco, of which Monte Carlo is recognized as the most difficult track in F1, there is no one, whether it is reality or the game is a great test for drivers.
In the real F1 race, practice race, qualifying, main race, complete run down to hundreds of laps, this work is simplified to 8 laps, while the race can be simple racing adjustments, through the front and rear wings, tires, fuel volume and other settings, in the car downforce, acceleration, top speed, tire wear, body weight and other performance to find a balance point, in order to achieve better results, but also let players in the real F1 race can understand some professional terms.
At that time, F1 races were very popular in Japanese TELEVISION shows, and Jun Imamiya, Masaharu Miyake, kazuhito Kazuhito Kawai, three well-known professional racing commentators also joined the F1L game, bringing players a familiar voice and a feeling of being there.
F1L did not pursue precision and comprehensiveness like modern F1 games, of course, this is also related to the disc capacity of only 650MB at that time, through careful design, let users experience the core fun of F1: famous drivers, classic tracks, basic rules, and I also started to pay attention to and like F1 racing through this stepping stone.
Since then, F1 has increased its efforts to use games to promote events, and many manufacturers have launched official licensed games, such as Formula 1 launched by Sony's Psygnosis, which has sold 760,000 sets on the PS console, and EA has also begun to have F1 year goods series, but with the emergence of GT Racing, players have begun to focus on such easy-to-use comprehensive racing games.
Due to the limitations of F1 event content, F1 games then entered a bottleneck period of development, Sony's Formula 1 series although there are new works every year, but sales and word of mouth have been tepid, in addition to a few core fans, F1 games are difficult to attract players' attention, basically belong to the dispensable New Year goods, until 2010, F1 games ushered in a turnaround.
At this time, the official decision of F1 will no longer widely license the game content, but exclusively cooperate with codemasters, a professional manufacturer of british veteran racing games, to create the only F1 game, and both sides have given the greatest resource support and brought the F1 series to a new level.
The first work "F1 2010" achieved a high score of IGN 8.5, PS3 and Xbox 360 two versions combined to sell 2.22 million, showing the professional strength of Codemasters, a year later "F1 2011" once again achieved two versions of 1.92 million sales, so that the F1 game was completely reborn, the annual sequel reputation and sales are superior, F1 series has become the most important trump card under Codemasters, The F1 game has also played an important role in the promotion of the event, many F1 drivers have given high praise after experiencing the game, and the cooperation between the game developer and the event organizer can be described as a win-win situation.
In the first half of 2020, due to the epidemic situation, many F1 races were postponed or cancelled, and the official launched a new "F1 Virtual Grand Prix" in a timely manner, with a number of real F1 drivers and other stars participating, using the powerful online battle live broadcast function of the latest F1 game, bringing fans a number of wonderful e-sports duels, the game's picture is surprisingly realistic, and it is even difficult to distinguish between virtual and reality.
In these virtual grand prixes, the advantages of professional F1 drivers are very obvious, the reason is very simple, the daily training of F1 drivers is not to drive a real car on the track to practice, but to use a professional simulator, so playing racing games with the steering wheel is even more important, just the familiarity with the track is far more than ordinary people, which also reflects from the side, the professional restoration of codemasters F1 games.
F1 game development so far, the picture effects and vehicle attributes and other content, has been fully recognized by the official, so that players have the opportunity to experience this very attractive sports competition, but from the popularity point of view, or can not be compared with "Forza Horizon" and other works, although the game has a variety of difficulty and auxiliary design, but the characteristics of the F1 race determines that the fault tolerance rate in the game is very low, a mistake may not be able to save the whole game, in addition, all the game experience is running laps on the track, It's not as appealing to new players as it is to open-world gameplay.
In general, F1 games are still very professional, suitable for those who like racing games and have a certain foundation, there is a lot of room for development in the field of e-sports, almost certainly, next year's "F1 2022", there will be Chinese driver Zhou Guanyu, then our domestic players will have a good reason, pick up the handle, relive the surprises that "Grand Prix" gave us more than thirty years ago.
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