The original is a 3D card game, ran great under DOS Glide. Didn't support 3D under Windows, but then who the hell plays games in Windows?
Carma 2 you remember correctly, it was an absolute dog in performance terms. On one of the navy ship levels I estimated (using the rate at which the timer updated) that it was running at 3fps on my Cyrix PR200+ / 48MB / Voodoo1 system. In general it was kinda annoying, as you say it had a lot of potential, 3d models for peds instead of sprites, some more excessive wrecking physics (splitting vehicles in half) but somehow it just wasn't so much fun to play. You'd get these annoying missions getting in the way and collisions with other cars didn't always feel right, in the original you should shunt other cars along in front of you and slam them into wall giving massive damage and time bonuses. In carma 2 pushing cars into walls felt a bit soft. Also in terms of the level design it didn't seem as good as Carma, aside from the demo level.
Carma 3 was a travesty, in spite of it's flaws at least Carma 2 was still a fun game. Carma 3 just seemed really hard and made wrecking much less effective, it seemed like on some levels the only option was to try and hit the checkpoints.
Anyway, fabulous news if this comes to anything. Even if the game isn't much cop (due to being dumbed down or some BS), at least they tried.
