Gran Turismo 4 is the latest game in Polyphony Digital’s renowned Gran Turismo racing simulation series of games. GT4 is called the "Real Driving Simulator," and for good reason. At the current time, there isn’t a single racing game available that can be compared to its gameplay. The game may lack car damage and online multiplayer modes, but gamers who invest some dough in this game are sure to be satisfied with the package.
Gran Turismo 4 is no different than any other game in the series, or any other racing simulation, in the way that it appeals to the more hardcore gamer and racing fan. This isn’t the type of game you can easily jump into unless you’ve played previous games in the series. Otherwise, you’ll spend hours getting accustomed to the workings of the game and even learning how to appropriately work one’s way through the game’s extremely lengthy single-player modes (and complicated game menus). With this said, Gran Turismo 4 is mainly a one-player’s game. Sure, there are multiplayer modes, and if a few players were to invest some time into them, they’d surely get an incredible amount of enjoyment out of these multiplayer modes. However, the amount of modes and options of play given to individual players makes the game’s single-player experience, in specific its "Gran Turismo" mode, the most rewarding. In Gran Turismo mode players will take a number of cars through a career mode that features all different types of racing events featuring city courses, traditional raceways, rally courses and a number of lengthy tournaments.
One of Gran Turismo 4’s greatest features is the option given to players to customize their cars in many ways. Players can buy new parts with the game’s credits to increase a vehicle’s horsepower, lessen its weight, adjust its handling, and a bunch of other tweaking options that can get so incredibly complicated that less experienced players can feel overwhelmed. That feeling multiplies ten fold once you realize that the game offers over seven hundred cars to acquire and tweak, from
"Gran Turismo 4 is a ’must-buy’ for fans of racing simulations."
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bands such as Honda, Subaru, Acura, Mercedes, Nissan, and even DMC, which is known for the DeLorean, the car from Steven Spielberg’s "Back to the Future" movies for those who don’t know. Surely most players won’t invest the time to tweak and collect each and every car in the game, however, for those who have the desire to do so, the option is there. Of course, some car racing enthusiasts would ask for more, since some current games and a few scheduled to appear in the near future also offer the option of customizing cars further with body kits, however, the amount of customization options already included, paired with the fact that GT4’s gameplay is beyond superb, lessens the "disappointment" of not having these features.
Anyone who has ever driven a car will tell you that most videogames fail to recreate the way these vehicles actually handle and perform at various speeds. Gran Turismo 4 tries to be as accurate as possible when taking one of these digitally rendered cars for a drive. Players will have to take many things into consideration, such as the distance needed to brake appropriately for a turn, and how and when to make turns in order to follow the best racing lines to speed your way ahead of opponents. Because of this, the amount of depth found in a racing game such as Gran Turismo 4 seems unrivaled. Luckily, in order to pound the workings of the game into the heads of players, Gran Turismo 4, much like previous games in the series, offers extremely informative tutorial sessions that are given whenever a player wants to earn one of the game’s five licenses. In all seriousness, those who never knew much about racing and cars could learn a lot from Gran Turismo 4 as they begin to understand once-foreign racing terminology and memorize the proper ways to approach various turns.
Speaking of turns, GT4 features some of the best and most challenging tracks featured in any racer. Many of the game’s tracks are pulled straight from reality, including the Leguna Seca track and the incredibly long and complicated Nürburgring, German race track. The tracks vary from city to mountain settings and this time feature some ice covered tracks for Ice Racing events. All of them are challenging in the way which they cause players to create finely tuned strategies and specific ways to approach each track with various vehicles. Only the best racing games can claim such a feat.
It’s interesting to me how some people like to say that they’ve driven many of the cars featured in the Gran Turismo games in order to prove a point and say that these games have the most accurate and realistic car physics around. Unfortunately, I won’t lie to you readers and say that I’ve driven more than one or two of the cars featured in the game. What I will say is that each and every vehicle in Gran Turismo 4 has their own distinct feel that players will immediately recognize when switching vehicles. You can even feel a difference after adding performance parts and tweaking a specific car. And, of course, each car reacts differently and appropriately to all different kinds of surfaces, which also varies further depending on the type of tires players have equipped.
One of the most noticeable improvements made in Gran Turismo 4 over its predecessor (aside from the obvious presentational and visual enhancements) is the game’s sense of speed. Those who believed that Gran Turismo 3 felt too slow for its own good should be pleased to hear that Gran Turismo 4 has an excellent sense of speed. While it’s not the fastest of racers available, when you take one of the game’s faster cars out for a drive, it’s likely that you’ll feel a “rush” of sorts when speeding
"This isn’t the type of game you can easily jump into unless you’ve played previous games in the series."
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down a straightaway. That sensation is one of the most rewarding gameplay experiences in a game of this type. Though, the sense of speed seems as if it should still be increased a tad. Hopefully, with the advent of next-generation consoles, the next Gran Turismo will really nail this characteristic spot on.
Not to act like this game is flawless, there are many things about Gran Turismo 4 that aren’t too pleasing. For one, the game has an incredible amount of menus to navigate and annoyingly long load times. While this may seem like a trivial nuisance, it’s really not because it can take its toll on the less impatient, those who want to jump straight into an event and not toy around with a bunch of menus and load times. Adding to these annoyances is the fact that “rolling starts” in Gran Turismo 4 have excessively long intro sequences. They aren’t five or ten seconds long, but often and longer, and there’s no way to skip the sequence. Of course, these are characteristics of the game’s presentation and they don’t really affect GT4’s gameplay, but there are indeed things that do, and included in this category is the game’s primitive AI and “bumper car” physics.
Most racing games are often plagued with opposing AI that drive in the same lines lap after lap and stay in the same ranking throughout an entire race. Gran Turismo 4 is another one of those games that fail to give a uniqueness to the performance of opposing racers, thus they feel like exactly what they are, and that is an AI-controlled opponent, instead of an opponent that feels lifelike and independent. Furthermore, these opponents act as if the player doesn’t even exist on the track. They’ll never try to avoid you but instead just ram into you when coming from behind, for example. Because the game lacks any kind of damage model, whenever you collide with an opponent, you kind of just bump off of them and this can be used to a player’s advantage since you don’t really lose much speed when colliding with an opponent and sometimes even barriers. Let’s say you’re approaching a hard turn at a fast speed… instead of slowing down and getting ready to hit the turn, you can just time and appropriately align a collision with an opponent to send you into and out of a turn without losing much momentum.
There are a number of different things to do in Gran Turismo 4. Aside from racing against the game’s AI traditionally with the game’s A-Spec mode, players will also be able to guide a CPU controlled racer in B-Spec Mode. As you can imagine, B-Spec isn’t half as entertaining as A-Spec mode. I just don’t find very entertaining to tell a AI-controlled racer what to do when you can easily do things yourself and get a more entertaining experience out of it as well. In addition, there’s also a photo mode which the game features in order to show up its excellent visuals. While this doesn’t significantly add to GT4’s gameplay and fun factor, it is a neat little feature that can actually allow players to print out these photos on a Epson USB printer. It’s not needed, but it doesn’t really detract anything from the gameplay experience.
Unfortunately, something which I feel does detract from the potential of a game such as GT4 is the absence of online multiplayer. When GT4 had first been announced, online play had been one of the game’s most anticipated of announced features. Unfortunately, PD didn’t include the mode due to technical and time restrictions. During a time when online multiplayer seems to be a gameplay feature included in most racing games released, it’s a bit disappointing to see that a game like GT4 doesn’t feature the option. It’s arguable that GT4 has the potential to be one of the best online games available for any platform.
In order to give off an excellent sense of realism for a game like Gran Turismo 4, car physics that are perceived as being accurate is not enough for modern gamers. This, of course, means that the game needs to look and sound real as well, and once again Gran Turismo 4 delivers.
While it may not be the best-looking racing simulation available for this generation of home videogame consoles, Gran Turismo 4 is a great-looking PlayStation 2 title. All of the game’s vehicles look on point, faithfully recreating the look of their real-life counterparts. They have realistic texturing, sheen, and even look believable under different lighting conditions in the game. Smaller touches such as the inclusion of 3D spectators on the game’s rally courses are also commendable, but the game’s most impressive visual feats, without question, would have to be it’s rock-solid sixty frames per second frame rate and the fact that the game supports both 480p and 1080i resolutions.
The tracks themselves look great as well, however, I must say that they aren’t too impressive after playing other more impressive-looking racing games such as
"...the game’s AI isn’t something you’d want to brag about."
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RalliSport Challenge 2 and Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. There’s this rough look to the game that plagues nearly every PS2 game available that detracts from its visual grandeur, and let’s not forget to mention that GT4 has this incredibly annoying screen flicker that occurs way too often for its own good, a nuisance that can actually cause players to possibly get distracted during difficult races.
The game’s audio effects are just as amazing as they have ever been. True-to-life sound is always a must in a game of this type and developer Polyphony Digital has accomplished another commendable feat with GT4’s sound effects. Each engine of every vehicle in the game sounds distinct and believable. The sound of screeching tires kicks in whenever the situation calls for it. And the sound of different surfaces further pulls players into an imaginary racing environment that is completely believable. I could ask for more, since drops down slopes lack that certain "umph," but simply put, the sound effects found in GT4 are superb. Its soundtrack, on the other hand, isn’t all too exciting. While I am fond of Van Halen’s “Panama” and Judas Priest’s “Free Wheels Burning,” most of the game’s featured licensed songs aren’t too great, in fact, I’ll go as far as calling them dull, with only a handful that are listenable. Though, there is some variety in the types of music featured and variety is always something good to have.
Gran Turismo 4 is a "must-buy" for fans of racing simulations. The game offers some of the most realistic and believable car physics found in any video game to date and hours upon hours of gameplay that could possibly keep the more hardcore player occupied for months. However, as mentioned previously, Gran Turismo 4 isn’t the type of game newcomers can expect to pick up and play and immediately fall in love with. It’s the type of game that takes hours to learn and even longer to master. Unfortunately, fans of the series should be a bit disappointed by the fact that the series hasn’t really evolved with this game; GT4 is nothing more than a small step forward for the series. There are no online multiplayer modes, there is no car damage model, and the game’s AI isn’t something you’d want to brag about. Despite these negative factors, however, you won’t find a better racing simulation on the PS2.
