Al, even though I agree with you on some points, one has to consider how games and gamers develop. And there's also the fact that nowadays games need to appeal to a bigger crowd of people. The freaky great physics are no good if casual gamers don't get it and thus won't give your game the chance it deserves. I bet good money that if Sony were to go back to WO 1, 2 or 3 a hell of a lot of people would complain about the physics the same way we miss the "good ol' days".

Also, since acceleration in general has been improved in Pulse and Phantom is a LOT faster (partly because of the reason mentioned and partly because the graphics have been improved), I don't miss a quicker start. It's still a turbo start and that's fine with me.

Honestly, I haven't yet noticed the fact that barrel rolls now suck a percentage of the overall shield power, but I think that's just the right way to go in order to make ships more balanced. Good thinking there, Colin an the rest!

And now back to practice. I haven't won a single frigging Pahntom race on Pulse's hard difficulty setting so far. Granted, I focused on Grids, Zone and anything else for the first few hours, but still... this IS "hard", alright. Plus, as for the few tracks that come with the Preview code, they are more technical than the average Pure course.

Ben