ISS 64 and V-Rally showed that complete authenticity to a real event was still not a total requirement for sports games, but being up-to-date was becoming an ever bigger deal. One year on from Formula 1, Bizarre Creations and Psygnosis jumped forwards two years from its recreation of the 1995 season to put out a sequel based on an ongoing championship. You can delight in being part of the close battle for overall victory between Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher and Williams’… Driverone Williams?
After Formula 1’s careful inclusion of all thirty-six real drivers across the year, this one can’t even manage the eventual world champion. Jacques Villeneuve was unwilling to lend his name and image to it. The equivalent solution to cross-dimensional Oliver Kahns was to let players go in and edit the names of all of the drivers, letting you un-flounce the Canadian champion yourself. This was just a precursor to bigger issues, with the Federation International de l’Automobile, who run Formula 1, managing to force the game off-sale for a while after objecting to use of their logo.
Even before all of that, Formula 1 ‘97 has a tricky relationship with reality. The real season ended with Michael Schumacher, holding a championship lead into the final race, deliberately driving his car into an overtaking Villeneuve’s in an attempt to put them both out and preserve his win. This was a massive failure, both in that Villeneuve managed to continue and got the necessary points, and that the response to Schumacher’s cheating was to disqualify him from the whole championship. In Formula 1 ‘97, though, driving like Schumacher did then is positively encouraged. Bouncing off other cars is a sensible way to go.
There is a giveaway the sheer number of different ways they got Murray Walker to talk about crashes for the commentary audio. Bump your way round Monaco and he’ll go from exclamations, to wry excuses that the driver had obviously lost concentration, to lectures about the new safety features introduced for 1997. It’s a pretty good guess as to what to expect from their players. Other such guesses are an interesting insight into the conflicts in making another successful console F1 game.
If you want to play through the World Championship, you have to work your way through a couple of different menus. More immediately presented to you as the default way of playing is the arcade mode. This divides the circuits of the 1997 season into sets of different difficulty levels to play through, and adds good old OutRun-style checkpoints to them. The checkpoints roughly line up with some of the advertising gates above the track (advertising ‘Faster’ in place of Fosters, and other such alcohol and tobacco-removal), but it’s difficult to know for sure where they are. Until your time gets extended, you don’t know how far you have to go, which rather ruins the tension of it.
The first track in the easiest level is Hockenheim in Germany. It soon became apparent that the quickest way of getting around it was to ignore all of the modern chicanes added to slow sections of the track down, and just cut straight across them over the grass. The car handles more like a lightweight but solidly-built missile than a car anyway, taking even launches into the air off the wheels of others in its stride. The game does nothing to make you want to handle it any more sensibly. And ploughing through, bouncing other cars into the walls, is quite a spectacle.
There’s something unsatisfying there, though. Formula 1 ‘97 and its basis in the sport mean that it can’t have been designed from start-to-finish for carnage. In pushing that ahead of a simulation, it does a disservice to both sides. Superficiality never stops feeling like an awkward fit, even as the deeper elements don’t excel (for a start, the short draw distance is pretty painful if you decide you want to actually take corners properly). It seems like Bizarre expected their players to seek cheap thrills, and made it easy for them, but also wanted the chance to distance themselves from it a bit. Like Driverone Williams and the other range of silly cheat codes you can enter with drivers’ names, they want the player to take on responsibility for the options they’re nudging them towards. The results manage to be both crass and toothless, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
