Oh sweet merciful Jesus, I just hopped back into Assetto Corsa's early access, and WOW, what a difference a few weeks makes. Kunos have promised to keep updating the game on a regular schedule, and so far they have delivered. Anti-aliasing options have been improved and the effect on the game's visuals is dramatic. They've also seemingly further optimized the visuals and improved the framerate on a lot of people's rigs. The game looks fantastic, though, it will be interesting to see how it performs when you are doing more than just time-trials.
I feel they've made some improvements to the force-feedback through my G27 setup. In a lot of sims, I feel like the FF is far too... stiff, I guess, but here, it all seems to feel appropriate to the driving conditions. Whether you're eating too much of the kerb, or locking the wheels, it feels like everything is being transferred to your hands. I'm having a hard time deciding which game does it better right now, this or Game Stock Car.
They've added a few new tracks, and some new cars. I think there are 15 cars now, and maybe 9 tracks or so. Each car they've decided to introduce to the game has been pretty different, so that everybody can have a car to suit their own tastes.
That said, the game still is just in early access. I'm not sure when exactly the team have targetted a final release, nor do I know what level of completion the game is in. There are still a few rough edges that need tending. I noticed during replays, that shadows and reflections have a tendency to pop in and out, randomly, which is a little jarring. Many of the off-track details seem unfinished.
Need for Speed Rivals PC - picked this one up during one of the Black Friday online deals for $25. I heard that there was a command line entry you could input to force the game to run at 60 fps, but I forgot to do so and ended up playing at 30 fps. To be honest, I was underwhelmed with the graphics. It doesn't seem to be much of a progression from Most Wanted, but I'm looking forward to bumping up the fps to see if that doesn't help things a bit. The unskippable tutorials at the beginning of the game are atrocious, and put Nintendo tutorials to shame. They take so long, especially when you just want to jump in and wreck ****. Once they're out of the way, though, the game is a lot of fun to play. It was kind of fun to know that the cops that were chasing me right out of the gate were live players, and matching wits with them was a lot of fun. It was very fitting for me when I managed to escape my first few chases, and gain some SP, only to lose them all wrecking in normal traffic on my way to a hideout.