Most games nudge you in one direction or another Gran Turismo 4 is more of a sandbox. What you do once you get there is up to you, and the lack of direction or thrust can be a touch disconcerting.
The hub screen feels like walking into a giant garage, a world of cars and tracks and skill. A little bit of slow skill building at the beginning will pay off big later in the game, and the game seems to reward a slow, methodical approach. It?s a good idea to get your licenses, and spend a lot of time getting used to how the cars drive if you?re new to the series. The racing physics are a lot less forgiving than they are in other games, and if you choose the wrong car at the jump like I did, you can have a very frustrating first few hours. The learning curve here isn?t so much a curve as it is a cliff. Now I was competitive, and was making some actual money going through the Beginner?s Circuit.
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I hit up the license challenges to get certified for some of the harder tracks and won a better car and sold off my other worthless cars and tweaked out my new ride, the Pontiac Sunfire Concept. The car was a bad choice, granted, but I was stuck with it. I picked a car at random (the ?88 Honda Coupe) and got to work.
You have $10,000, and you get to buy a car. The book is pretty much worthless ? you?re really on your own to figure out what to do. There?s a busy main hub screen in career mode, and there?s little or no instruction on where to even begin. If you?ve never played a Gran Turismo game before, it?s easy to get overwhelmed here. Living with a conscience is like driving a car with the brakes on Is this the new high water mark of games about cars, or is it just so much hype and nice packaging? There?s only one way to find out. So let?s get our race on, pop the hood of this sucker, and peer inside. It?s almost as if Polyphony is daring you to keep up with it. It?s a show of almost arrogance, and it creates a sense of challenge. It doesn?t matter, people will buy this game no matter what, and they know it. Stark white, with a small piece of glistening, open metal on the cover. AdvertisementĮven the packaging of the game evokes a certain mood. Gran Turismo is one of the final salvos in this generation against the competition, and it proves one thing: When Sony is backed into a corner it gets mean.
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Sony is having a great year so far, and has come through with new franchises (God of War anyone?) and what may be the best games in established series (Tekken 5, GT4, Devil May Cry 3).
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The PS2 is getting up there in years, and newer offerings from the Xbox usually leave the system in the dust in terms of features and graphics. The importance of Gran Turismo 4 to the PS2 right now is impossible to overestimate.
It?s about spending days on the oval going through every inch of your car one tweak at a time to gain that second. It?s about arguing for hours about this car vs. It?s a game about what it feels like to hit the perfect line, to see what it feels like when you finally get your streamlined, shiny sex-beast to take a turn perfectly. What the Gran Turismo series is and has been since the early PSone days, is a game about cars. Project Gotham Racing 2 is another good car game that?s a touch less arcadey if that?s what you?re into. There?s nothing wrong with a car game, Burnout 3 is one of the best car games in existence. There are really two types of racing games out there: car games, and games about cars. The time for this sort of game may have come and gone on the PC, which is a shame considering what could be accomplished if a game like Gran Turismo were ever to be ported. Now with Gran Turismo there really isn?t much we can compare it to on the PC, other than NASCAR games or European-only rally releases. We?ve already done this once for Halo 2, to look at how the world of FPS games was doing outside of the juggernauts being released for the PC. Once again we delve into the world of console games for our next review.