Do you remember the first time playing LFS?

I think it was 3 years ago, i got a demo CD from the "Gamestar" (german gaming magazine) with the demo 0.5 h, i think. I played it with mouse and standard settings (auto gear, break help...) and i only thougt: Man, this game sucks! My mouse was way to sensible and it all felt so artificial. I uninstalled it and didn't wanted to play it ever again. Two weeks later i read an article on some gaming website, which rated it like 80% or sth. I couldn't believe this and reinstalled it, but this time i disabled all driving aids and used my old Logitech Wingman GP. I think it was like one of this "Ahh" moments and i realised that the physics are pretty awesome^^ Played the demo then for 3 month till my exams started, so no time for playing and i forgot about the game. One year later S2 was released. Played the demo again, now mainly online and it was great. Wanted to buy it, but i was pretty broke and exams started next month, so again, i stopped playing it. One year ago, my final exams were over and i had 2 month full of free time, i finally bought a S2 license. Now seeing the smaller amount of servers and the high skill of the other drivers i had some doubts if a noob racer like me can have fun with this over a long period, but after the first races with the MRT and UF1 (which i think ended in the back of the field) all doubts about the 34€ were blown away No crashers, respect between the drivers, really good racetracks, the whole community, lfs world... It's the whole package that makes LFS worth every cent.

would be intresting how you came to this awfully addicting game

I think for me, I had been playing the Midnight Club 2 demo online and discovered BHMotorsport and RSC whilst looking for more online racing games.

I downloaded demos of anything that sounded remotely good, and read a fair amount of the RSC forums to find out what the score was with various games.

This would have been about September 2003 I think, I bought LFS and played for a bit but didn't really get into it that much (I was a heavy CS player at the time). Then later on in the summer of 2004 a few races were organised on the forums of OcUK, these became a regular thing and OcUK Racing was born. I got my first wheel, a DFP, in Feb 2005 just before GT4 came out and also bought GTR at about the same time. GT4 was good fun, and was the first time I had driven the 'Ring but after playing LFS I just couldn't get along with GTR at all.

I think these lyrics sum up the LFS pretty well...

Quote :

Nobody does it better
Though sometimes I wish someone could
Nobody does it quite the way you do
Why'd you have to be so good?

Quote from Flughafen :

I think it was 3 years ago, i got a demo CD from the "Gamestar" (german gaming magazine) with the demo 0.5 h, i think.

One year later S2 was released.

Well, S2 is 0.5 so your first demo must have been some 0.2 or 0.3... I guess, 0.3h, if you refer to three years ago

Anyway, I got the reference to the demo after EA announced the closing of the Motorcity Online servers and I was looking for something similar 4 years ago. Someone in some forum pointed me to LFS. I did 2 offline laps and then hit the MP button... There i was, on the track, in the middle of a race and WOW, that was awesome... end of story

Played the demo from a PC Gamer disc back in summer 2004 i think :S . Either way, was just hooked. Bought S1 soon after that..

Quote from Vykos69 :

Well, S2 is 0.5 so your first demo must have been some 0.2 or 0.3... I guess, 0.3h, if you refer to three years ago

Anyway, I got the reference to the demo after EA announced the closing of the Motorcity Online servers and I was looking for something similar 4 years ago. Someone in some forum pointed me to LFS. I did 2 offline laps and then hit the MP button... There i was, on the track, in the middle of a race and WOW, that was awesome... end of story

Basicly the same, sounds sad but the adrenaline really got going the first few times you started to race with people. I heard about it on a forum about a year before I downloaded it (Was on dial up at the time) then when I got ADSL I remembered that game I read about and downloaded it. Then the "WOW" hit.

I heard about LFS about 2 years ago but as i had just my pc had just had a melt down so i went back to my old computer (was about 600Mhz :shy so didn't even try to play but then in november 2005 i got a new PC downloaded the demo and played it for a couple months. Couldn't really afford it before christmas so in january 2006 i went s2 and never looked back.

well i found the game from GP4 forum somewhere, and they were all talking about LFS and Rfactor so i googled them both and ended up like LFS more that was back in december 2005 i think well ive never looked back since, this game just has some of the best phisics i have ever played on a pc well even better then my xbox games.

i dont use a wheel but i have tried just cant get the control of it with a wheel, so i use my xbox control seeing as the xbox is in the cubboard somwhere .

racemania

Don't remember exactly when I got into LFS but I registered in April 2003. My mate told me about it and said it was a great racing game you drive using the mouse. I'd only played NFS before then so was intrigued and downloaded the demo which was 0.2, still have it installed on my old hard drive. Loved it since I first drove it, felt so realistic and was a great challenge.

Sort of got bored of the demo cars and I checked on LFS every one in a while till S1 and I then got a wheel. But life took over, I forgot all about LFS and sold the wheel. Rewind 5 months I find myself with heaps of time and remember LFS. Check the website and there's something called S2 now. Sweet. Download the demo, have a play and get hooked more than ever. 1-2 weeks later I'm buying a licence and ordering a G25. The rest is history

I think that I did spin at BL straight with XFG when I drove first time and I was amazed how you really have to drive it like real car, also braking was nice as you could spin it there if not being careful. I wonder why cars are so stable now

I believe it was 2002 November or Christmas, when they started to accept cash I bought S3 license number 80

Haha i remember my first time. It was soo cool

I remember some from the dSRC saying that i dont have to take every turn in gear one several times

Must have been around newyear 2003. Beforehand I played NFS Porsche for a long time. With a friend. On one computer.Best of 21 mostly. We would drive a course alternating, best time got a point Then I somehow discovered LFS, so we played that. On one computer. Alternating. Mostly drunk and stoned. So my first memories of LFS are somewhat blurred but beautiful
First time online was about half a year later (!). I joined a server and did not have a clue when or how a race would be started. Some cars were running around the track, but I was able to join.. Was a new concept for me at that time. I got used to it and had a lot of fun online,Emilio, teddy, you still there?

I could swear this has been done before. In fact, I know it has, but couldn't find it in search...

Anyways, it seems that unlike many people here, I've had a wheel/pedal controller for 11 years. I bought my first PC in 1995 and found Papyrus Indycar Racing 2 and bought a Thrustmaster T2 for that. I had that same PC and wheel for many many years and played ICR2 for many many years offline. When I finally recieved a better PC, I upgraded my offline sim racing with NR2002/3. I still hadn't ventured online as I wanted to gain some experience with NR2k3. I ran a full season of 100% length races which took forever. I had started a second season when we visited my brother-in-laws place and I played GT3 with him. It was cool (yea, I knew, definitely not a sim) but it got me thinking about hunting down something for the PC that had less than race prep cars.

I was hunting around BHMotorsports and saw a few. I grabbed the GTR and rFactor demos, as well as LFS S1. I saw the screenshots of the XFG/RG, RB4, and the rest of S1 cars and thought it was what I was looking for. I ran a few laps offline and it seemed pretty good. Then I nervously jumped online for the first time racing. The wow factor started coming out then. Unfortunately, I wasn't as impressed with S1 as others have stated they were. That was strictly demo.

As the novelty of racing online wore off, I was thinking of going back to NR2003 and trying it online. I was a very active reader of the LFS section at RSC, and learned that S2 demo was released for testing. Awesome, definitely have to try that out. When I made my first lap with S2 demo, that is when I made the decision that an S2 license is a must have.

The main problem back then was that there were serious racers on that S2 demo, as in S1 licensed folks, along with the idiot wreckers. This is about the time the wrecker teams that so many have met had come about. Tweak and Fordman, was it? got together to reinstate the Clean Racers Club that had been around a long time ago before my time in the S1 pre license release demo. After that happened, as people logged on the servers, you knew which ones were CRC voted in members and knew you were in for some good racing. To this day, back then in the pre S2 license release demo was some of the best racing I had ever had.

One evening on the servers, someone with the nick "Scawen" joined the server. Yea, right, it's really Scawen.... Anyone could make up that nick and use it since there was no registered names being the demo release. He raced a few quick 5 lappers with us, then announced in chat that he was releasing S2 licensed "tomorrow". Again, yea right... Low and behold, the following morning I log onto RSC, and there is the announcement that S2 licensed has been released! I promptly bought my license (waiting for the next paycheck) and the rest is history.

October 2004 - MrsK went on holiday with Wills & my mom - I stayed at home (we were having the house rewired).

Tried the demo (offline only iirc) one afternoon & coughed up my £12 within a matter of hours (there was a small delay whilst the devs added England as an available country).

I still remember the first time I ran GPL... Lotus at Monza & about 4fps...

I had been racing various sims (ICR2, NASCAR 2,3 etc), but mostly on keyboard.

I had downloaded the LFS Demo (S1) from BHM while I was there looking for cars,sets,files,etc. for the NASCAR games. I tried it offline mostly, but since I was KB/mouse driving, I basically only looked at it for minor entertainment purposes. It was pretty cool, so I guess I stored that one back in my mind.

My father was racing dirt oval cars when I was growing up, so when Dirt Track Racing came out with Eldora Speedway (the track he raced at), we had to buy it. I bought two steering wheels from AVB, and we went at it for a while online, just him and me. Great fun!

One day, I remembered LFS and since I now had a wheel, I fired the demo back up and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Man that was fun! I immediately bought a license and went online on February 1, 2004, to become a n00b roadblock. I raced for quite a while, but too many times I would get disconnected from my dial-up connection while leading a race on the last lap. LFS was one of the reasons I finally made the decision to get DSL. Haven't looked back since. Oh, and like that thread a while ago about how much money LFS has saved me: HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS!!!

Must have been pretty early on. I had been tooling around with Racer (www.racer.nl) in 2002 and had loved this first encounter with proper analogue controls in a driving game. Although still using a mouse. I eventually got annoyed with the flakeyness and quirky handling and hoped that maybe out there somewhere on internetz that there was a similar project.

Found an early demo towards the end of 2002 for LFS and despite its early stage in development preferred it over any other "sim" at the time. Was still playing CMRally 2.

Was on dial-up and didn't venture online for a year or so. I think I remember one of my first completed races online. On a hot day I was at a friends house and dled the game for him and I had a quick race on BLGP/XFG on his MS FF. Dripping with sweat by the end of the race Fantastic.

It was about three years ago if I recall correctly, when I first played LFS. I was browsing BHMotorsports, searching for cars for Colin McRae Rally 2.0. Then I stumbled upon LFS, downloaded it and I remember that I thought it was nothing spectacular. I tried it again, that must have been a few months later and I got hooked. That was in the 0.3E time if I recall correctly

I remember it was shortly after I'd heard that I wasn't going to get the Williams drive that year, some time between them declining to sign my contract and them taking out a court injunction to prevent me from ever re-entering Oxfordshire.

It was defenately one of the earliest version when there was only blackwood and three cars. I'm sure I found it through Blackholemotorsports.com, I checked that site quite often at the time. I still remember how hard time I was having in the XRT climbing up the pit straight after last turn and the rear steps out. It took quite a while to get in terms LFS' tire model and the fact that sliding the rear doesn't always mean a spin like it did in Sportscar GT. Still, being a GPL fanatic I like GPL a lot better. The cars were more brutal and I had more tracks that you could ever have in LFS. I tink I kept playing GPL as my main sim while taking short breaks with LFS, mostly getting frustrated with it . I still remember something about how I found S2 and played countless times on demo servers XRT/BL1 .

Bought the lisence through Janezki on Tue, 12 July 2005 and go the lisence codes early on that day. At the evening of the same day I was racing the FO8 at Blackwood. Easy combos first

It took quite long time to get to like LFS, I pretty much hated LFS when I tried the XRR for the first time. GPL still keeps coming back once in a while. I guess I have these 4 year periods with racing games

EDIT: oh yeah, I had to postpone my LFS participations due to having to drive the williams F1 for one season

I think in my case it was one of those early 0.04 versions or so. I have to say, I don't remember exactly WHEN it happened. I was browsing though the Racing Legends forum (so you see, it was really long time ago ) and someone mentioned it there. I tried the demo with a mouse, and was immediately blown away by the natural movement of the cars. At that time, everything except GPL sucked so LFS was a very nice surprise. The rest is history.

it was a sunny afternoon in april 2003, i was wearing the new underwear i bought the day before, it fitted perfectly. the pizza i had for lunch was great, cokes tasted good and was ~ 7C° cold. i looked into a pc game mag and saw a small article "geheimtipp" (secret tip?) about lfs. downloaded it, went to mp, annoyed everyone with the question on how to get the gtt "enabled" and loved it since then (had a thrustmaster formula one wheel since 1995 or 1996 for nfs1).

Quote from Vykos69 :

Well, S2 is 0.5 so your first demo must have been some 0.2 or 0.3... I guess, 0.3h, if you refer to three years ago

Anyway, I got the reference to the demo after EA announced the closing of the Motorcity Online servers and I was looking for something similar 4 years ago. Someone in some forum pointed me to LFS. I did 2 offline laps and then hit the MP button... There i was, on the track, in the middle of a race and WOW, that was awesome... end of story

after searching my hard drive: 0.3A

Before i came to LFS i only played 100% arcade racer like NFS, Carmageddon and Gene Rally (really great racer, did cars for that game too on http://www.gr-ct.de.vu/)

Is there someone in here that really started playing racing games with LFS?

I had played Viper Racing 1999-2001. I still wish that those tracks were in LFS, those were awesome fake tracks! Anyhow, I eventually stumbled onto LFS just pre-S1, and wasn't hooked right away - probably because I was too tentative to go online, even for a while after I had S1. But something about it kept drawing me back, since there was nothing around to fill the niche and the itch for realism (had no idea about GPL somehow) Eventually it sunk in that I'd stumbled onto something special. I probably have almost double the mileage that LFSW reports because I fooled around offline so much. In fact, I didn't really go online much until a while after S2 was out. Same with the forums actually, I read it for ages back in the RSC days but rarely posted until a while after S2 came out.

I guess you could say I "really" started playing sims with LFS, since it's taught me tons about cars, physics, setting up the car, racecraft, competition etc whereas everything before that was just to "fool around driving" for the sake of it. I was definitely never "serious" about it before LFS.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I remember it was shortly after I'd heard that I wasn't going to get the Williams drive that year, some time between them declining to sign my contract and them taking out a court injunction to prevent me from ever re-entering Oxfordshire.

The bloody fools!


-Searched for online racing game. Found 0.1 demo, tried, liked, played to death etc.

Saw it on BlackHoleMotorsport webby, downloaded it and joined a server.. I remember asking people how to join the game Oh and how to turn the wheels on (stupid cheapy no spoke graphics setting) Five days later I was running with the boys at Fusion about .6 from the WR

I first stumbled onto LFS 0.1 demo (or something like that) around September 2002. I found the official website by chance and thought it was some sort of Need for Speed mod, but it wasn't. I found it pretty decent, I think I only played single player though.

Then later in 2003, throughout all of 2003, I played LFS demo online every so often, always trying to lower my time in the XRT on BL1, I had managed 1:28.8 or something like that (good at the time, WR was like 1:26.9). Then in January 2004, I decided to buy S1. I got it and I was very impressed with it and never looked back. Ever since then I play LFS every so often. When S2 came out, I waited about 2-3 months before getting it, then I jumped into the FOX when I got it and was blown away.