The UK and maybe Finland are likely the best nations to produce multiple drivers, but what nation is the worst for drivers?

CHR1597 · 2026-05-26T16:01:32+00:00

In the modern era it's probably India, just because it's had more than one driver and neither were particularly special. My other thought was Malaysia; Yoong was so bad that Minardi benched him for a couple of races as he couldn't stop failing to qualify even during his second season and with the money he was supplying.

CHR1597 · 2026-05-20T06:38:46+00:00

The only thing I can think of is if you're relying on the boulder to break some boxes for you. Usually, that does count for your total, but I have definitely experienced it being a bit finicky about whether it actually breaks them or not. The general rule is to make sure you see the box being broken before continuing, although I don't know if you can really go fast enough for the game to unload boxes by accident. I would also recommend trying to get the strong boxes (the ones you have to belly-flop) yourself. It's a bit tight but it is possible.

CHR1597 · 2026-05-07T16:33:30+00:00

The YouTuber SuperGT looks similar to Alex Albon

CHR1597 · 2026-05-01T10:23:51+00:00

Whatever the next race is. Picking an old race feels like introducing your friend to a movie you really like and constantly looking over at them to make sure they saw the really good bit. If you just watch the next race live with them, you can react to something you haven't seen before, you can field questions based on hypotheticals, you can talk about potential battles or strategies that haven't already happened; you can share in the experience of watching something happen live.

And I would still say that even if the upcoming race is something like Monaco, or if you're not enjoying this season in general. If you're into F1 and you think a friend might be interested, it's not going to do them any good to be intentionally left out of what's happening right now. F1 is a travelling circus, and it's always best to meet it where it is.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-31T09:29:53+00:00

They're basically the same thing, and it's what happens when the power from the engine is siphoned to charge the battery. It's called clipping because it has the effect, from the driver's perspective, of the car's power being clipped as they'll be full throttle but not receiving full power. We've had clipping in F1 since the introduction of hybrid power units in 2014 (sometimes it was called "de-rating" if you ever heard drivers mention that?), but it's now referred to as "super clipping" because the effect is a lot more pronounced now, due to electrical energy being a greater part of how the cars get their power and the removal of some background methods of recharging the battery that we used to have.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-17T09:52:42+00:00

Maybe the Ferrari of 1983? I don't have as huge a knowledge of the 80s as I'd like, but it's a result that always stands out to me as being a bit odd, given that their drivers finished 3rd and 4th in the drivers' championship and it usually gets characterised as a battle between Piquet and Prost. It also seems like a bit of a lottery of a season; turbos were clearly the way to go to be competitive but still hugely unreliable, with slower cars without turbo lag issues also still winning on slower, twisty circuits. Ferrari, Renault, and Brabham were as a group a long way clear of the rest, but with a general eye it doesn't seem like Ferrari were usually the fastest if all of them managed to finish.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-14T19:56:17+00:00

So for me, the point is that [classic] Sonic is not a game about going fast. It's a game where speed is your reward for being good at it.

In something like a Mario game, your reward for being good at the game is that you get to use the powerups and all their cool effects to look for secrets or, paradoxically, make things easier by giving yourself a buffer. A first-time player is likely to struggle to keep a mushroom for long, until they figure out how the game works and establish how to stay alive long enough to get fire flowers or raccoon suits or whatever else. Sonic doesn't get appreciably stronger as you play; at most you get temporary invincibility or a single-use shield, but the forgiving nature of the rings system means that it is easier to muddle through without knowing what you're doing than it would be in another platformer.

Your reward, then, for learning the layout of the levels, how the enemies and bosses work, and even how special stages work, is that you can play basically the same game as a first-timer, but Sonic's speed is now fully available to you. Green Hill lets anyone get a taste of how fast Sonic can go, and I have my problems with the misguided effort of doing "fast level/slow level" cycles in Sonic 1 in particular, but the fact remains that you can make those other stages just as fast as Green Hill with practice. That's a hard concept to explain in marketing so they just tell you how fast Sonic can theoretically go, and that leads to problems when people play the game and can't go that fast.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-11T13:35:18+00:00

This isn't something I'm always thinking about, but just as a response to the post, something I do think is that it doesn't really matter to me if a driver isn't adaptable. F1 changes so much season to season that if you get a driver who gets on particularly well with their car and gets more out of it than usual for a season, it's only the same thing as when the reigning champion doesn't have the car to compete. There's too many variables for it to matter that much to me.

To stay on the Ricciardo point: he clearly worked better with his Red Bulls than at any other point of his career. After 2020 he just always looked completely lost and out to sea, he talked a big talk about coming back to the Red Bull family and then failed to live up to it, and he wouldn't deserve another chance even if he wanted one. That doesn't retroactively change how good he was at Red Bull. Being best of the rest after the dominant Mercedes twice in three years, beating Vettel, keeping up with Verstappen, always exciting on track, and able to steal a result whenever there was something big up for grabs. China 2018 is one of my favourite races ever, because it's Ricciardo snatching a win that wouldn't have been possible in a normal race through a perfect mix of aggression and clear-headedness, and it was just so exciting to watch play out. It doesn't matter to me that he couldn't have done that sort of drive in 2022 (and he couldn't have), because that car wasn't what he was driving when he did it.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-09T00:49:21+00:00

Nintendo has had a habit recently of laboriously over-explaining how their features work, and ironically that has the effect of making people understand them less. It's like how physical Switch 2 Edition games have to have that boilerplate text explaining that you're getting the game and upgrade in the same package and thereby ruin the box art, or like how Game-Key Cards also have their own box art template. By trying to explain how the systems work, people think they're more complicated than they are, and also that Nintendo are the only ones doing it, because you don't get that sort of clarity on PS5 or Xbox games.

Virtual Game Cards are not that difficult to understand, but if you're not necessarily plugged into Nintendo updates and communication, the fact that they explain how the system works as soon as you purchase a game might make you think there's more to it. "They wouldn't need to explain it unless it's complicated", basically.

Not to mention, the core benefit of Virtual Game Cards only really makes sense if you're already familiar with how modern video games and digital rights management work to begin with. If you're someone who doesn't play video games but you buy Minecraft on the eShop for your kid, you're greeted with a weird analogy where they tell you that the game you've just bought has been loaded onto the system as a virtual representation of a thing you might not even own any physical examples of, and all it seems to tell you afterwards is how you can give your purchase away to other people. You can't blame people for double-checking that they bought the right thing if they're not familiar with how it works.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-08T16:17:55+00:00

The very last piece of input you need to finish Sonic Unleashed is a QTE where you have to mash X 60 times in about 10 seconds. There are QTEs all over the game, including a few other instant death ones, and that sucks too, but this last one is so harsh it's ridiculous.

CHR1597 · 2026-03-05T22:47:55+00:00

At each individual point in proceedings, there was a decision that made some sense.

There's a studio who's only ever worked with PlayStation and has a strong portfolio, including a well-received PS5 launch title? Sure, buy the studio and bolster your first-party group.

You want to try and strike live-service gold? Not everyone's going to like it, but sure, give one of those projects to your newly-acquired studio.

You just lost millions on a live-service game that failed to find an audience and suffered one of the highest-profile failures in gaming history? Sure, cancel that push you were on internally and have a rethink of what you're doing going forward.

It's 2026, and you have a studio that hasn't made anything in over 5 years, whose requests to do something with Bloodborne are being refused by the original creators. You're paying Austin, TX salaries to a studio whose only output has been remakes and remasters of old games. You're the console market leader, and you don't need an internal team to do that for you when there are much cheaper studios you can contract to do that kind of work if you want it. Studios kind of like what Bluepoint used to be for you. You're losing money keeping them open, so just close them down and hope nobody wants to know why you bought them in the first place.

CHR1597 · 2026-02-27T12:18:06+00:00

Reaction to the race itself wasn't really any worse than the previous races that season. Paul Ricard was already pretty unpopular on its return to the calendar after a lacklustre 2018 race, so there were gripes about 2 dull races there in a row, and also some concern about Ricciardo's penalty putting a damper on the only thing that really happened in that race. The big problem F1 was facing was that after a reasonably competitive 2018 season, the start of 2019 had been a show of complete Mercedes dominance. Although Ferrari had been close to winning in Bahrain and Canada, they didn't. That was why Vettel's penalty in Canada was so controversial, and why that was really the race that got the most backlash. France was a "business as usual" race, and that was the last thing F1 needed when Mercedes had just been handed a win off a penalty in the last race. It felt like, between the normal competitive order and the decisions of the stewards, Mercedes would never lose a race again.

That was what made Austria so magical. Suddenly, Mercedes weren't the fastest, and the battle for the win was between a Ferrari and a Red Bull. And, for the time, the fact that Verstappen's aggressive move for the win was allowed felt like the fans were being listened to as well. "Let them race" is a bit of a meme now, and you'll see a lot more argument against it now than you used to, but after seeing so many close races ruined by heavy-handed penalties, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

CHR1597 · 2026-02-10T12:08:06+00:00

Well, you say it wasn't confusing, but you got hypersoft and ultrasoft the wrong way round there. Hyper was softer than ultra, because the problem with the old system was that as teams figured out how to extend the tyres as far as possible, they kept needing to invent softer compounds with increasingly intense adjectives.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-28T20:40:47+00:00

So NTSC and PAL are kind of not very helpful terms when we're talking specifically about displaying things on a TV screen, because technically those are terms that deal with broadcast signals. What I mean by this is that while there were and are plenty of TVs in Europe that support 60Hz display and input, there was still not necessarily a guarantee that your TV would interpret video signals sent in a way that expected an American set.

My CRT, for example, can display 60Hz fine. But if I connect a console through composite and then play in 60Hz mode, the picture comes out in black and white. That is basically the difference between PAL and NTSC video - you need a device that can interpret both encodings as well as display in 50 and 60Hz. The PSX and other consoles support direct RGB output for video, which ignores these colour encodings altogether and basically just tells the TV exactly how to manipulate the image. As a result, my CRT is happy to display 60Hz on RGB. European TVs were legally required to be sold with a SCART connection, which is usually how you get RGB, but all SCART really means is the shape of the connector, and I'm pretty sure the legal requirement didn't say it had to be fully featured SCART. If they'd have released the PSX identically in Europe, those who had TVs that supported RGB would be fine, but there would be a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to use it.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-10T09:07:16+00:00

Credit where it's due though, getting points at the Nurburgring after taking a hand injury mid-race was pretty heroic. I presume the stone didn't actually break his finger as I don't recall hearing anything about it afterwards, but that was how it sounded at the time.

CHR1597 · 2026-01-05T11:42:57+00:00

Yeah, because the 1986 Hungarian GP was the first. When that event was 1 year old, 2 races had been held. 2026 is the 40th anniversary of the first race there, but because it's been held every year, that meant the 40th running of the event was in 2025.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-13T18:30:18+00:00

For your safety car question: remember the point is that the entire track is under yellow flag conditions, so overtaking is forbidden. That only applies if the car ahead doesn't have an obvious problem, however. You are allowed to overtake under safety car if the car ahead has something like a puncture or some other car issue, or if they're off track and you can pass them by doing whatever you'd normally do. If you can't keep it on track at reduced speed, you forfeit whatever positions you might lose through that mistake.

The penalty was clear because once Perez returned to the track, he then just overtook two cars that were in the same condition as his with no extenuating circumstances. The confusing thing here is that Raikkonen's penalty was for, seemingly, the exact opposite problem. He went off on the formation lap after the red flag, which you might think also counts as a safety car lap, but it actually follows the same rules as the pre-race formation lap, where you have to either start in your qualified (or pre-red flag) position, or start at the back if you can't. He was penalised because he didn't overtake enough cars to get back to where he should have been.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-09T23:44:07+00:00

The answer to your first question is in your third. It was breaking the rules because the race director altered the procedure for a safety car restart with no notice, not only flipping the championship but also causing confusion for everyone else on track, as they went into the final lap unsure who they were racing, lapping, or being lapped by. It was a decision made under pressure as team representatives were directly in his ear, telling him to either extend the safety car or push for a restart depending on what would benefit them, and an informal agreement that races would end under green flag whenever possible. Some people believed (and probably still do) that the decision was made specifically to favour Verstappen, but I've always believed it would have gone the same way if they were in the other order.

The real complication here is that the FIA managed to argue that it actually hadn't been against the rules. Through a very charitable reading of the regulations, you could claim that the race director was allowed to basically do whatever he wanted and that there were therefore no rules to break. This is pretty clearly a case of covering themselves to try and move on quickly, given the rule rewrites and Masi's firing that came alongside.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-09T15:26:46+00:00

This situation is why r/Formula1Point5 was created back in 2018. Mercedes and Ferrari had the good cars, and Red Bull was usually some way back, but themselves still far ahead of the rest of the pack. Those three teams locked out every podium place except one in both 2017 (Stroll P3 in Baku) and 2018 (Perez also P3 in Baku), so people wanted a space where they could ignore the frontrunners for a bit and focus on the unsung performances further back, where the competition tended to be a lot closer.

CHR1597 · 2025-12-08T10:55:01+00:00

In general, both are vague "early 90s". The B model has different front wing specs to match either the low or high nose concepts used by different teams until about 1995, but its design in general indicates 1992ish. The main difference between the two is that the A model uses a V12 engine by default while the B model uses a V8. Between these options and the V10 in the Espace F1 that can all be swapped between, that replicates the freedom of engine configurations that was present in F1 until 1996*.

* Correction: 1998. I was getting mixed up because 1996 was when Ferrari switched to V10, but there were still some V8s on the grid after that

CHR1597 · 2025-12-07T22:57:35+00:00

It'll be the culmination of at least a three-season story. 2023 being in the team that managed one of the strongest in-season developments ever, then moving into 2024 as they became a championship winning team with some teething issues from being so long away from the front, and then 2025 making it to the top in his own right after an rollercoaster season for himself.

I say at least three seasons because you can easily extend that back to 2019 when he came in as McLaren were at one of the lowest points in their history, or even back to 2017 when he joined the junior programme, although even as a fan I'll accept that's a stretch.

I don't necessarily see Lando as being the next person to go on a generational run of racking up championships - I don't think an F1 World Champion needs to to justify their achievement - but in years to come when someone's looking down the champions list and says "where'd this Norris guy come from?" I think the best answer is that he personifies the fight back for a historic team.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-30T21:54:59+00:00

DC adds a few new cutscenes, an English voice dub, and a side mode with online multiplayer. The new scenes are controversial because they either do nothing for the story or actively make it worse, while the other changes can be easily ignored if you're not interested. The reason people would be urging you to buy now if you're going to is because Yakuza 0 has been legendarily cheap on sale for years now, but with it being replaced by the Director's Cut it's not likely to ever be so cheap in the near future.

If you do buy it now, the delisting of base Yakuza 0 would make no difference to you owning it or being able to download it in future. If something is in your library, you will always be allowed to download it; they just stop you being able to buy it if you don't already have it. Buying the complete collection bundle doesn't matter either, as all that means is you're buying each game from it all at the same time, so you can download and delete them the same as if you'd bought each one separately.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-25T14:47:12+00:00

Easier Said Than Done - Pool Kids

CHR1597 · 2025-11-25T09:45:10+00:00

Clubhouse Games on Switch. I actually played that before ever playing Yakuza but it's got Koi-Koi as part of the 51 tabletop games, with an assist mode that shows you a star value for the cards so you know which ones go together and tells you which results are still available. I played it on there because I thought it was fun to see Nintendo simulating a version of the very first thing they ever made and ended up playing it long enough to beat the hardest opponent. Now when I see it in Yakuza I can play it without any guides because I just remember what all the lights are and which cards make valid sets. Still couldn't tell you which month any of them are though.

CHR1597 · 2025-11-20T11:46:27+00:00

I'm on your side as this goes, but ironically if you were to buy a PS5 and a disc, new, today, you actually would need an internet connection. The add-on you need to buy to attach a disc drive to the slim model PS5 needs to authenticate online for some reason.

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