F1: Championship Edition (PS3) 2010 Season

I can't wait for F1 2010 from Codemasters to launch in September but I need to fill my F1 gaming fix before then! Since getting a PlayStation 3 on launch I've sunk 90+ hours into F1: Championship Edition. Simply put I love F1 and I love the game.

I realise it's not the greatest racing game ever but it's the only F1 game so far to launch in the HD era of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. I'm really not a PC gamer (I own rFactor and have tried the various F1 mods but just find it to be a lot of hassle) so F1:CE is still the F1 game for me until September at the earliest.

That said I'm going to play through a full season (copying 2010 as best as I can) and paper over the cracks that expose F1:CE as a game now 4 years out of date in terms of tracks, teams and drivers! To keep things simple I will keep all mentions of drivers and teams exactly as they were in the 2006 season.

I'm of very much average ability. I know the tracks so don't need to use any aids such as corner indicators or racing line assistance. But for someone that knows every circuit configuration off by heart I'm really not very good. I find the AI annoying at the best of times. Easy is ridiculously easy and hard stupidly hard. It seems Studio Liverpool really struggled with this as even on medium the AI levels are so inconsistent from one race to another. Because of this I will vary the difficulty between medium and hard depending on the race in question.

I'm driving the Red Bull of Christian Klien and my team mate is David Coulthard. I'll be doing full length race distances with qualifying, damage, variable weather, re-fueling and tyre wear all enabled. I know re-fueling is banned in 2010 but there's no option to turn it off independently of tyre degradation. Stupid I know but hey, it will make the racing a bit more interesting!

There are a couple of my own tweaks I add. I turn off driver penalties as I find the rev limiter punishment that F1:CE implements annoying to the extreme. The game often gives a penalty when no shortcut has been made so the system is basically broken. I'm not one for corner cutting anyway so it's not really an issue. My other policy is that although the game allows it I will not continue in qualifying if I crash out and lose a wheel, be it going into another car or a wall. It wouldn't happen in real life so it won't happen in my game!

Rather than play Career or World Championship mode I'm opting for individual Grand Prix Weekends. As I plan to do each race on the weekend the real-life race takes place this lets me replicate the race calendar of 2010 as closely as possible. With F1:CE based on the 2006 season a few of the circuits have changed since then. Some tweaks were obviously necessary:

1. Imola replaces Valencia

2. Nurburgring replaces Spa

3. Magny-Cours replaces Singapore

4. Indianapolis replaces Abu Dhabi

5. Korea removed (19 real-life races, only 18 circuits in F1:CE)

Each race will get its own blog post. This will contain race highlights, the finishing positions of the point scoring top 10, updated drivers and constructors standings and sometimes a YouTube video if I recorded the race.