I put a good 10 hours + into the game now, all driving with gyro controls. Got up to level 22 and well into Semi-Pro. The game has some amazingly subtle effects that really struck me. For instance, I was hotlapping one of the early time trial events trying to get the gold with the New Beetle, which wasn't in fact very easy, and then just seeing how far I could push it. It was cloudy, but at one point, after quite a lot of laps, suddently the sun briefly broke through the clouds, and you could see the area lit up by the sun come up in the distance and then you were driving in the sun for a little while, after which it got cloudy again. Then slowly fog came up as it got dark.
I do understand people referencing PGR when it comes to the driving model - there's certainly a similarity, though the car behavior is perhaps a bit more realistic still. So far I can't really understand the complaints about any of the penalties - all that just seems far for this kind of racer. In fact I think they are on the light side - I've had a few times where I benefited from a penalty situation.
I have to reiterate - kudos to the track design, they are really good. The higher level races get pretty darn hard though!
I also finally managed to join a club, and had a full online race. I drove a car and track that I hadn't driven before, but still managed to get 3rd out of 10.
The leaderboards still aren't in. Also, when I was driving earlier, I had a brief period where online connections crashed my game three times in a row when it had just connected to the server, though never at a bad moment fortunately. I think they've disabled the leaderboards and in-game records for now, to ease the load and allow for online races.
The successful gyro steering though is a big thing for me. It has made this the best track based racing game to play with a controller for me since forever. I hope Sony makes it mandatory for all games. Maybe I'll tweet Yoshi about it.
