NFS not becoming a sim is a good thing; there's always Forza and GT for that.
Midnight Club, Burnout, GRiD, DiRT, Juiced and a ton of other titles cover the arcade end of the spectrum, for the sim end right now we have a grand total of zero cross platform titles, and that sucks.
We sim folk may compare all the finer nuances of GT and Forza, but at the end of the day if you have a PS3 you have GT, if you a 360 you have Forza. There is no choice, the only real competition is general bragging rights between Turn10 and its' fan base and Polyphony and its' fan base. They don't compete for the same sales, they don't have to follow a particular release schedule, they own the market and have no direct competition. Don't get me wrong, from everything we have seen I'm sure both Forza3 and GT5 are going to be absolutely stellar- but how far into this generation are we before we get one of those games(sorry T10 fans, Forza2 was nowhere near the upgrade it should have been). If EA had decided to enter into the more hard core sim market they would have given us an offering that could go toe to toe with the big two and maybe pushed a bit of innovation into the market.
Right now, GT is going to kind of sort of have damage- not like PS3 fans have anywhere else to go if they want it. Forza is still without weather- not like 360 fans have anywhere else to go if they want it. A title like Shift could have represented an offering that could have forced both sides to compete with each other indirectly with Shift having to deal with each of them. I think it would have been a great situation all around.
In terms of sales potential those two dwarf the arcade offerings, by a huge amount too. It isn't like the potential isn't there to recoup massive development costs- GT5P generated ~$120Million dollars as a souped up demo.
Well, us sim-fans want that cockpit view combined with the developer's history - not mucked up by EA.
Read a piece the other day and thought of you, heh- GT5 will use the eye so when you turn your head in cockpit mode, it will pan the camera left and right. Thought that was a nice little touch for the cockpit guys(still riding my front bumper, maybe when I get a projector and can go 100" I'll change it up

).
Really looking like another GRiD atm, that really pisses me off. Not that GRiD was bad, but it wasn't something I am chomping at the bit to play again. Even if they made a 'perfect' GRiD it would still suck badly as a sim..... meh...... back to waiting yet again for a real racer
For the record, good chance I will buy this game, I do enjoy a good arcade racer to be sure, it's just I had exceptionally high hopes for another entry into the sim market and this review kind of brought me crashing down in that regard.
That review confuses me - I can't determine if he reviewed it by using a wheel at any point in his trials. While it sounds like he played it without assists, that also wouldn't make sense because one or two previews had stated a wheel was required if turning off all assists.
Maybe that's the issue? Maybe the reviewer dropped the ball and left all the assists on and was using a controller and it defaults into scrub mode? I guess I can hold out hope.
It sounds like, when racing in regular (and not drift), the car maintains a pretty good grip on reality (hehe, witty pun) when in complete control, but when grip is lost control isn't that hard to maintain when there really isn't much if any control in those situations.
Yeah, that's the part that is killing it for me. If you could really go in too hot by 40mph into a corner and all you had to deal with is scrubbing some speed on the grass and countersteering a little bit it completely destroys any sense of tension whatsoever. I have a blast with Burnout, but I don't recall ever having finished up a race and had my heart racing and my hands sweating.