THE GOOD:Very realistic cars
Plenty of cars and tracks to race on
Ability to customise cars in many different ways
THE BAD:
Endurance races got quite boring
SUMMARY:
Gran Tourismo is just about the only racing game series I own, they don't particularly excite me that much. But this one did grab my interest. What impressed me at first was just how life-like it seemed. Once I'd got over that I realised how fun this game was to play and just how many different cars were available and how you could customise them.
To start off with you can only afford to buy a fairly slow car to compete in the lower races. As you won races and got more and more money you were able to buy better cars and upgrade them with parts like better gear shafts and the like. You could only upgrade a car so far, but often it was cheaper to do that then to buy a whole new car with similar specs. There are also real car companies like Mitsubishi and Honda and real cars that are actually out on the road. While I'm not too interested in cars I'm sure that pleased some people to be able to beat other cars with one they possibly own. The first car I bought with earned money was a purple, front wheel drive car for 7000. I used this car an awful lot in the early races available to you and I don't think I ever sold it despite the fact it becomes useless later on.
As you advance through the game the races get harder basically because the other cars you race against get faster. To keep up you need to buy new cars that are faster. There are 4 types of car: front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, four wheel drive and mid wheel. These do have a big impact on how the car handles when you race it. Front wheel cars lack acceleration but are very hard to spin which is why I loved my purple car that cost 7000. Rear wheel drive cars have good acceleration but can spin out very easily and I didn't own too many of these. Four wheel drives are my favourite as they had good acceleration and were hard to spin out. I'm sure there was some downside to it but I never realised what it was. Mid wheel cars have the engine in the middle of the car and these are proper racing cars designed for speed, I owned a few of these.
There are plenty of races to do, some divided into classes and such where you could only use a certain type of car. This was fair as it stopped you taking a souped up car into a slow race and obliterating the opposition. It also meant that you needed to have a variety of cars in your garage. As you earned more and more money you could afford better and better cars. But every manufacturer has some top of the range cars that are extremely fast but extremely expensive. My favourite was the Mitsubishi Skyline (I think that's what it was) which was a yellow 4WD car that was very fast. Whenever I could use that car I did because it usually won me every race. These 'super cars' could not be upgraded in anyway as they were already pre-set with any upgrades which is why they are so fast.
As well as regular 3-5 lap races there were also endurance races. These were long 30-60 lap races that took anywhere from one hour up to two hours and beyond depending on what car you used. I could only do these when I was in the mood because once I got my Skyline I could win almost all these and I would lap everyone several times. But driving round the same track 60 times did get tedious. It would have been more fun I suppose if I didn't use such a fast car, but then it would require immense concentration not to make any mistakes. Grand Valley Speedway is the big 60 lap one I think. You do get a very large amount of money for winning, but I personally found it pretty boring.
In order to win you generally have to know a track inside out. If you know what corners are coming next you will know the best way to take the preceding corner and where it's best to overtake. There are even a couple of tracks you can race backwards, which makes the track entirely different to race on.
This game was highly enjoyable and was very realistic. Whether you were more interested in just the racing like me, or the actual specs of the cars and messing around with those to tune your car, this was the game to having in terms of racing. There was so much to do that I always felt like playing the game again to try and either improve my time or to try another part of the game.
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