I dont think you will find a more realistic horse racing game anywhere, and for the price too,sure some people will not be happy,depends what schedule your playing, the patches mark brings out have helped a lot for some people.Ive played the game from SO2 onwards and this is the best,sure the horse database could be increased a lot more,but im sure that will come in so 6. 4.5 out of 5.

i love it
i agree the improvements from so2 to 3 and 3 to 4 were massive 4 to 5 has not been a huge step forward but some great improvements
i will always support this game its 1 of a kind and by a mile the most realistic with the lge adding a new dimension its a game
that just keeps giving its an impossible task to keep everyone happy

Gota agree also, games over the years have seen big improvements, but imo so5 has seen some good improvements of course not what everyone had hoped for like my self would have liked a bigger db of horses and more meetings to reflect rl, but so5 is better than so4 and mark always releases patches to fix things and makes things better, would love to see the a1 owners improved but other than that its still an addictive game and its far better than HRM2

Yep. agree with what everyone here as recently said, when you get spoilt with something it gets too easy to criticise. No other horse racing game comes even close as far as realism goes in my book.

By far this is close to realism to horse racing in the real world, SO only uses 2d graphics but the games is hugely addictive and brilliant, of course 3d would be better but 2d ill stay happy with it

I'm happy myself with 2d, I think 3d would ruin it.

said it b4 its happend with so many games
example international cricket captain in early 2000s was such a class game so addictive 2d graphics brilliant gameplay you could play a whole season in 4
or 5 hours

they sold the rights to the game in 05 or 06 to a new company who spent fortunes on new 3d graphics really tarted up graphics
the rest of the game was the same as the older versions just players were updated with the new 3d graphics it slowed gameplay drasticly
i mean 10x as long to play a whole season it slowed the whole game down
it ruined the game to be honest i have not bought a new version of the game since 2006

for me realistic gameplay is everything and i really dont care about graphics mysef i am happy with them they have been improved in so5
i dont think 3d graphics would make the game more addictive

i know for some its a biggy but not for me

Not bothered about 3D, I think it would be a waste of precious time and money for us and Mark. It isn't like a 'first person shooter' game where the graphics make the game, it isn't about great horse graphics. It is a simulator, for me the actual racing is a very small part of the game as a whole and to waste time on 3D graphics would be pointless I think. There are still other things that need improving like jockey and trainer AI, the breeding barn needs more extensions, the horse database needs to be larger, etc etc. If we had a perfect game with no faults and no further room for improvement then 3D *might* improve it further. But as it is I'd be quite disappointed if Mark spent his time on 3D animations rather than on some of the current things that need improving now.

(Now I feel like Mark is definitely going to post a 'SO6 will be out in June with all new 3D graphics' thread! )

so6 out in june thats great have you inside info Supercat

Totally agree, 3D graphics are un-necessary. As Supercat says, the strength of the product is that it a simulation, not fancy graphics.

Paul, I had a similar experience with cricket captain after the 3D graphics were introduced, in fact I remember taking the game back to shop I bought it from and managing to blag them into exchanging it for another game.

I prefer my cricket graphics like this in fact:-

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6 away mate

You can buy football manager 13 for the same price now. The game becomes repetitive very quickly, not sure if the horse stats and stable add ons actually mean anything. Its the best racing game for the pc but that isnt saying much is it, I know games like Football Manger are about double the price of this when they come out, but if you think 20 is good for this you have to say its extremely fair for the other games. If Football Manager is worth 40 quid, this game should be a 5er at most tbh, huge difference, but its only one guy making this and he does a good job, would be good if a big gaming company actually tried making a racing game, but I dont think the market is big enough. 3 out of 5

I still haven't rated it because I genuinely don't know what to rate it as...

I want to give it 5/5 because it is by far the best racing game out there and Mark is just awesome, and for all his hard work he deserves a 10/5 But there's just something missing for me...

4/5 seems fair, but like I said above there is something missing from this game that makes it less addictive than previous versions. It frustrates me when my horses lose because of bad jockey AI and it still happens a lot so there's a lot of ctrl-alt-deleting (I like to try to have a stable full of horses with only 1's against their name). Though I can see the improvements, trainer AI is still very poor. e.g. a big improvement is that horses are being sent to more appropriate races so a 3 yo filly is running in the Guineas, Oaks, Coronation. What is frustrating is the amount of trial races they take in on the way. I have my own schedule made from the editor, and to the best of my knowledge I only added one or two extra Irish Oaks/Derby trials. But rather than a filly running, for example, in the Nell Gwynn, Guineas, (possibly a 1m 2f Oaks trial), Oaks, then Coronation. She will take in 2-3 Guineas trials, 2-3 Guineas, 2-3 Oaks trials, the Oaks, and then the Coronation. This must make the races easier for me to win which makes me happy, but it does make form hard to work out. The colts often take in even more. So I will enter my filly in the Falmouth/Matron not worrying about that other filly she has been beating easily all season and suddenly that filly will slam mine by 10+ lengths and turn out to be a superstar. But she couldn't win the Guineas, Oaks or Coronation Stakes because she had already had 5-10 runs prior to those big targets. It is like the AI trainers are targeting the trials as actual big races, rather than prep races for a bigger target later in the season.

The other thing is that now I have edited the schedule to have the King George stakes over 5f and the King George stakes over 1m 4f, a lot of 5f horses (though this has rapidly declined since a patch, not sure which one) are running in the Arc. This means that every year my horse wins it by 20 or more lengths which makes me extremely happy, but the Arc is the biggest race in Europe so it shouldn't be this easy to win. Plus usually my horse gets rated 140 after a win like that in the Arc which rapidly decreases once he gets beaten in his following races. In addition to this I find that the best 1m 4f horses often swerve the Arc to go for the Canadian International, Pris Von Baden, or another 1m 4f G1 I have included; or they run in all those races so they are exhausted by the time they get to the Arc.

This comes down to trainer AI and the way that races are prioritised. I don't know how this is done, but maybe an addition for the future would be to have priority races so rather than running in the Canadian International a week before the Arc, a really top horse would swerve that race and go for the Arc instead. This would mean that the Canadian International would be like it is in recent real life, easy to win for horses who might not be top G1 class. I hope with a bigger horse database on SO6 that a lot of this will be rectified as we won't need horses to be entered into races just to fill them up.

Jockey AI is an obvious one, quite often they will still ignore my orders. E.g. 'Hold Up, Don't Trail, Challenge Earlier' will be interpreted as 'Force the Pace'. Then I get told my horse isn't good enough. Or they will sit too far out the back, ride into the back of the pack rather than down the centre where there is a lot of free space. I think jumps races are too easy to win from the front. Most of mine have orders of 'Even Pace, Challenge Earlier' I smash most jumps races where the best horses are hold up horses because my horse goes on at 4 f - 3.5 f out and doesn't get caught. Similarly if you tell a jockey to challenge earlier over jumps sometimes at places like Chepstow/Aintree/Chelts he will go on at 5 f - 6 f from home and gets caught at about 2 f out because he obviously went too early. Whereas at Kempton/Wincanton/Haydock he will wait until 3 f - 2.5 f out and then won't catch the leaders because they are already too far ahead.

3/5 seems really unfair to Mark and the amount of effort he has put into the game, but I think it does represent how I feel about it.

So I won't vote above but I will give Mark a huge 100/5 for putting up with us and working so hard to give us a game that no other big game maker would touch. Plus working with us and asking what we want and trying his hardest to implement that.

For the game I will give it a slightly disappointing 3/5, some of the really major additions weren't made, but it was released fairly quickly after SO4. So I hope that with SO6 more time can be spent on improvements and that the forum won't rush Mark into a hasty release. Take your time, make it perfect and you know you will always have lots of willing and trustworthy volunteers to beta test the game. Actually, no don't trust any of these b******s on here, just give it to me to test!

The schedule issues really bug me, for example many a time a horse has beaten one of mine in a 1m 2/1m 4 race, and then the trainer is fined for improved form, when a look back at its form shows it to have run in the diamond jubilee or some other sprint race- this is on standard uk flat schedule

I went for 4/5.

I still think it is a great game but I do think there need to be improvements in the game play, especially to help manage larger stables, make it easier to import/export and the breeding barn. I would even say that the stats are a little disappointing because I dont think they reflect what happens on the track. Oh and the jockey mode feels a bit too much in favour of the other riders! Its either that or I really am useless at it!

For me its the small & simple things that would make this game 5/5 not the fancy dan stuff.