As the fourth game in the Gran Turismo series it would be expected that the faults of the previous game(s) have been ironed out and padded with even more of the good aspects that made the series so enjoyable. This would be a bit of an exaggeration, however, as those quirks that kept Gran Turismo 3 from being completely realistic are still present in the fourth iteration. On the other hand, there is so much more of what makes the series fun that it's not too difficult to forgive those quirks. The bulk of the game takes place in the Gran Turismo mode, where you're placed on a little overworld map/menu with your house and various icons scattered around for different countries' automakers, used car shops, races, as well as license tests, the photo mode, and a handful of others. You're granted 10,000 credits to purchase a new car - or up to 110,000 credits if you transfer money from a GT3 save - and must then enter races to make money and take license tests to earn the higher licenses you need to enter more advanced races. Along the way you'll make increasing amounts of money, and purchase and win a large variety of cars while racing on different tracks. That is the game in a nutshell. New to GT4 are driving missions, which are similar to license tests in that they use preset cars and are quite unforgiving. Most are Project Gotham-style overtake races where you have one or three laps to get in front of all the cars ahead of you, and others are a bit more bizarre - four of the missions take place on the high-speed ring and require careful drafting in the wake of the other cars in order to build up enough speed to pass them after you pull back into the rush of wind at 100+ mph. Also new is the photo mode, a somewhat strange addition that lets you pick from a number of locations to take photos of a car of your choice. The areas are somewhat limiting in where you can place the car, but the camera can be moved more freely and with a bit of tweaking (with focus, white levels, colour balance, etc) you can produce some impressive looking pictures that can be transferred to a PC via USB drive or printed directly to an Epson printer, as advertised along with hats and the Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel in the manual. The photo mode may sound dull, but if you have any interest in cars and/or photography, it is quite rewarding finding the perfect angle that fits the car and the backdrop - tweaking the lighting and lowering the camera to get your Shelby Cobra looking downright menacing, for example. The Gran Turismo mode also includes used car dealers, which were in GT2 but removed for GT3. Most of the cars available for purchase there are older models of the ones available directly from manufacturers, and their prices are fairly reasonable; however, you're stuck with whatever colour has come up on that week's rotation. One unnecessary 'feature' of the used car lineup is that you MUST take it for an oil change, as every used car seems to have the factory oil still in it and is disgustingly black. Old oil in GT4 means a significant horsepower drop, so all the used cars are essentially being sold crippled. An oil change only costs 50 credits, but the new oil changing animation takes 10-15 seconds to complete and gets very old after you've sat through it a few dozen times. Also present is an arcade mode (which is largely pointless unless you really want to try out some of the cars you're unable to afford at the start) and split-screen and LAN multiplayer modes. The new B-Spec mode that lets you control a cpu driver is an interesting addition, although fairly boring except in a few key sequences - namely, endurance races. Since you can speed up B-Spec mode by three times, you can just let your B-Spec driver finish a one to two hour race in about half an hour. Beyond that, he's not much use, especially if the car he's driving is on par with the opponents. The B-Spec AI seems to have serious issues with passing other cars, which makes him more or less useless for a lot of races. So now that's out of the way, what is the actual racing like? What has Gran Turismo 4 fixed and what has it failed to fix? Well, the previous games' most lamented problems involved a complete lack of car damage and an often encouraged ability to use other cars or walls as bumpers to help you around corners, or poorly placed walls leaving chicanes completely open for cutting across. GT4, sadly, addresses only one of these issues in the most basic of ways. Car damage is still absent (with the minor exception of tire wear), and it's still quite feasible to use objects to help you around corners while driving high powered cars. However, the license tests are brutally unforgiving, failing you for leaving the track, hitting a wall, or clipping the pace car in front of you. Driving missions and rally races penalize you for five seconds if you hit a wall or another car - for the five seconds you are limited to 50km/h, which is quite a deterrent to abusing the driving system, especially in driving missions. Of course, the penalty can become an annoyance, as if you're sliding around a corner on a dirt track and your opponent comes in from the side and bumps you, YOU will get penalized while he's free to keep on driving at full speed. It's also possible to avoid the wall penalty by sliding the back end of your car out - if the rear portion of your car hits the wall you don't get penalized, no matter how hard you hit it. Now that those are out of the way, it's time to get to what makes Gran Turismo 4 so amazing - it just feels so RIGHT. The driving mechanics in the game are absolutely perfect, and racing around the various courses in different cars conveys an excellent sense of weight and speed. Braking and accelerating and turning all result in a realistic amount of body shift and it's often easy to forget you're just playing a game. The physics seem even more convincing than they did in GT3. If the game has any faults in that area it's that the dirt and snow-based rally driving seems a little more shallow, and a bit too slippery. One new addition to the game that makes an enormous difference to the driving experience is in the engine sounds and road/wind noise. They may not be ALL entirely different, but the engine noises vary wildly from car to car and if you bolt a turbocharger on, you can hear it kick in at higher rpm. Depending on the aerodynamics of your car you'll start picking up a lot of wind resistance at a certain speed - the audible rush makes it feel even more like your car is screaming down the asphalt. Slipstreaming behind other cars on straightaways lets you pick up extra speed, and a reduction in the wind noise makes it obvious when you're avoiding that friction. The graphics themselves are about as beautiful as the PS2 can put out, although the pre-race driving cutscenes seem to suffer from jittering between resolutions. This odd graphical glitch occasionally intrudes into the first half a lap of the races and is extremely distracting - it may be limited to older PS2s, however. Still, all the older courses returning have seen significant face-lifts, and the newer courses are no less beautiful, especially the lengthy Nuruburing and a road/rally course set in a famous US park. Sound - as previously mentioned via engine and wind noise - is almost universally excellent and tarnished only by the soundtrack, a collection of almost universally terrible songs. The inoffensive jazz music that plays during menus is tolerable, but the game is done a huge favour by turning music off during races. The game's AI is decent enough, although it boils down to them sticking to the perfect line with an occasional screw-up. Hitting them doesn't seem to spur them into trying to hit you back and your opponents are quite oblivious to your presence on the track, as they will happily ram into you from behind with no attempt to get around. The best thing that can be said is that GT4 doesn't appear to utilize any form of rubber-band AI. If you get a good lead and don't screw up, you'll keep the lead; and as expected, your opponents aren't going to be nice and let off the accelerator if you find yourself trailing. With so many tracks and even more available cars to race, GT4 can be quite overwhelming. There is a lot of content present in-game and it's almost as hard to pick races when you start as it is to try and describe them all. Combining the perfect feel of driving with that huge selection of cars and little extras like the photo mode often make it seem as if Polyphony wanted to create a tribute to automobiles as much as a sim-based racing game. After all, it's fairly safe to say that if you love cars, you'll love GT4.
Gran Turismo 4 could be considered one of the best Playstation 2 games ever made. As the fourth game in the series, Gran Turismo 4 improves greatly on the previously successful Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, which seemed unthin... Read Full Review
The Gran Turismo games are known for how realistically they depict car racing, and Grand Turismo 4 definitely lives up to the name. What this game lacks in flash that many arcade-style games have, it makes up for in eve... Read Full Review
