Alright everyone, I'm new here and what better way to start than with one of my all time favourite game series'. With Gran Turismo 6 on the horizon, I think it's time we look back on one of the most influential racing sims ever. For my list, I will only be ranking the full, home console releases and discarding the PSP game released in '09 and all of the concept/prologue versions. So that leaves us with 5 games, 15 years, over 70 tracks and thousands of cars. Lads and ladies, let's get started: In at 5... Gran Turismo (6.5/10): The game that started it all, the first driving simulator on a home console, this blew the competition away in terms of graphics, number of cars and driving accuracy. I still remember playing it for the first time, I must have been about 8 or 9 and just being confused for the first couple hours. Where were the crazy handbrake turns? The wild screech of the tyres? Where all the bumps, ramps and power ups? This definitely wasn't Ridge Racer or Mario Kart, I was in a new and brave world. The original GT wasn't the game for me, not straight away anyway. It was only when I got back to it, after a year or so of l#the box laying in my bedroom, gathering dust, that I truly appreciated it. Maybe it's because, by this time, I had started to become a car enthusiast, I was reading about cars more often, learning what was the fastest and the best. GT had these cars and they looked terrific for the time. I was hooked. Having played it recently, I just can't rank it any higher because it has aged like a whore in Flea Bottom. In at 4... Gran Turismo 5 (7/10): The most soulless game in the series, I was stunned by Polyphony Digitals lacks of...va va voom. Where was the panache? The style and the polish? From the supreme GT 2 to the elegant and beautiful GT 4, Polyphony and made simulation racing fun, accessible and extremely exciting. 5 lacked all that, it seemed to be a relic of a bygone age, no car damage (later introduced, rather begrudgingly via a patch), dated, last-gen car models for the majority of the cars and a dense, complex menu and gaming system which just hadn't move with the same force as Forza and co. For the first ever time, I found myself looking elsewhere for my simulation thrills, like a bored housewife living in London's suburbia. This isn't to say the game was bad, far from it, it was a good, solid racer but it didn't quite reach the heights of it's predecessors. At times it could be stunning and enjoyable but when the veneer faded, we were left with a rusted old shell with dated mechanics. In at 3... Gran Turismo 4 (8.5/10): The last great GT game to hit the market, this was what everyone had been waiting for. It pushed the ageing PS2 hardware to places the console had never been to before. The graphics were sharper and more clean than ever before, the handling tuned to almost realistic perfection and the fun had, on split screen on some of the night time tracks was simply beautiful. However, this was the game that showed us there were cracks starting to erupt in GT formula. Other racing sims had already given us more customisation, more damage and more danger, so it seems that GT 4 was a prophet of sorts for Polyphony. But still managed to hold it's own against the competitors and when judges in comparison to it's contemporaries, it provided the best pure driving experience on the market. In at 2... Gran Turismo 2 (9/10): Polyphony took all the promise of their much loved original and crafted what was it's generations finest racing sim and possibly the best sports game of the time. The cars handled well, the tracks looked immaculate and the PS1 hardware was tricked into doing wonders, car reflections, light, tyre smoke, the dust from the rally track...it blue my little mind at the time. So did the 100s of cars on offer, each one something I had only dreamed of driving. This was hat a racing simulator should have been, intensely passionate about the serious side but also able to let it's hair down when it needed to. How could Polyphony improve??? Could they improve? The answer was a resounding yes. In at 1... Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (9.5/10): Almost the perfect racing game. This was all about Hamauchi and co. refining what they already had, a smaller roster of cars than GT2, it made up for it with tighter handling, more beautiful car models and some of the most competitive driver AI I had ever come across. GT3 still stands up today, some thing all great games must do. This was the purest distillation of competitive driving ever seen on a console. You couldn't ask for a better debut on a console than this. GT games have never quite managed to live up to their great grandfather, with GT4 and 5 suffering from a loss of sheer class, so personified in the second and third entries of the game. Fingers crossed that GT6 can somehow bring back the thunder.
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