Inside Sim Racing

The much teased Scottish Highlands circuit and Audi Quattro S1 have made their way to the Steam version of Assetto Corsa. Update v1.12 launched on February 14 as a surprise Valentines Day gift to PC players everywhere. The update may have included quite a few fixes and tweaks, but the true stars of the show are the new track and car.

There’s been a lot of interest and debate over the new Logitech G29 steering wheel that was formally unveiled a few weeks ago, but not much in the way of hands-on impressions.

Darin Gangi of InsideSimRacing was one of the first to get his hands on the new MINI Clubman Vision GT just released in GT6 Update 1.16, and he’s made two videos highlighting the car. The first shows a complete lap of the new Midfield Raceway circuit (starting around the 4:30 mark), while the second shows a sub-7:00 lap of the Nordschleife.

As you may recall, the Thrustmaster T300 RS wheel – the company’s newest model since the T500, the official wheel for GT5 and GT6 – was unveiled back in June at E3.

Get your first in-depth look at early Gran Turismo 6 gameplay, guided by hosts the hosts of the popular YouTube channel Inside Sim Racing.

During the GT6 press session at Gamescom 2013, Kazunori Yamauchi referred to the game’s new Course Maker feature as “fundamentally different” from what was seen in GT5, and noted that players would be able to “lay out their [custom] tracks freely” in an area “100 kilometers by 100 kilometers” in size.

The new “official” GT5 steering wheel, the Thrustmaster T500 RS, releases this Wednesday, and InsideSimRacing got their hands on an early unit to provide us with some much-needed details and first impressions.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Gran Turismo 5 launch party in Madrid last November and, though I took lots of photos, I didn’t have any good video to share. Fortunately, before the festivities kicked off, I met up with InsideSimRacing’s European correspondent Andreas Nie, who captured plenty of great footage at the event and around the city. After the press session, I sat down with Andreas to talk about the event and my personal first impressions of the game. It’s all in ISR’s latest video feature, published yesterday and embedded above.

This head-to-head shootout between GT5 Prologue and Forza 2 by the Inside Sim Racing guys caused quite a stir in our forums last week, and it’s worth posting here for those of you who missed it.  Needless to say, the latest GT game didn’t fare quite so well, partly due to the fact that it wasn’t able to provide the features, size, or scale of a complete title.  This has put some GT fans up in arms, and you can argue that some of the evaluated criteria wasn’t appropriate.  That aside, their critiques are honest.  More than anything, though, the review spotlights what features Gran Turismo 5 needs the most in order to stay competitive.