So I had my first ad-hoc experience today. Since we had our little kids with us and they couldn't be left alone much, we didn't get a chance to do much, but just enough. Here are my initial experiences:
Sharing cars
Great feature. One selects give mode and sets up a 'room' (interesting that they use it like this, eh?) in a specified slot (e.g. 1). The other selects receive mode, and waits until the room becomes visibly occupied and open for business (garage door half-rolled up). Then you go in, and you get the option to receive the cars, and then give yours as well. Unless it's a total coincidence that we had the exact same number of shareable cars, it may well be possible that you can only receive as many cars as you can potentially give back - but again, that might be a coincidence. In our case, we got to give each other 14 cars.
Racing
We did two races, and both had jackpots (2x and 3x). Once also there was a jackpot for a particular player but that player didn't win so I don't know what additional effect that might have had. This is a great way to get money quick though - after two 2-lap races (Apricot Hill and Midfield) I had something like 263.000 credits. So with two PSPs, this is definitely a quick way to make a tonne of money, and racing here doesn't change the day either so if you have two PSPs, it looks like you can basically buy all the cars you ever get to see in any color
.
As some of the reviews already mentioned, the framerate drops to 30fps while racing in ad-hoc mode. It didn't bother me much though, the game played surprisingly good in ad-hoc, really dug it and could see me doing that a lot. The only thing I really missed is being able to watch a replay of the race. It's not a big surprise, but I still would have liked it a bunch.
Oh and as a reminder, there are two ways to use this functionality online - get the Ad-Hoc application from the Japanese Store (which I'm about to do shortly) or use X-Link Kai (or whatever it is called again) to use your PC as a portal.
I'm using
... the only new things versus this instruction so far seem to be that there are 6 updates to download. Interesting by the way that this download from the PSN store installed automatically. Maybe that always happens now if you don't do a background download?