Gran Turismo 4

Written by Adam Woolcott  on February 28, 2005

Review: The Drive of Your Life? Hell, enough hours with this game and you won't even have a life.

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GT4 contains the usual arcade mode and Сcareer' mode known as Gran Turismo mode in this edition. The arcade side is pretty generic and serves as a quick-race and multiplayer LAN hub, and likely where the removed online setup would have been. The decision to remove internet play near the end of the development cycle is awfully disappointing, since racers and online have mixed together since GT3 hit all those years ago. Sure, you can use Xlink to trick the PS2's LAN setup a la XBConnect for the Xbox, but it can't match the ideas Sony and Polyphony had in mind. It's possible there truly will be a GT Online disc released sometime this winter or at least prior to the PS3 release, which might ease the pain especially if it retails for a relatively inexpensive price (such as $20).

For many though, online play would have merely been icing on the cake thanks to the GT mode. Like always, the single-player game takes on racing in epic form, thanks to exhaustive license tests, seemingly endless amounts of races, and more cars than you can shake a speeding ticket at. Remember how Gran Turismo 2 had a zillion race types, including those individual car maker races? Now about double that, and you've got GT4. There's races for almost any kind of car you can imagine, and you'll be at the game for probably 100 hours or more before you get around to all of them. Of course, you must get a car and get a license, but if you have GT3 save data, you get a break. That break being the auto-earning of the B and A license, and if you have 100k or more credits in GT3, 100k will be transferred over, in a sense making the game move along much quicker since you can buy a used Skyline or Lancer Evo and go rip through the easier races to make some headway. GT4 is structured where you really do have to use almost every kind of car to see and do everything Ц do so and you're rewarded with some absolutely killer vehicles. License tests are in larger numbers Ц 16 per license, and one silly Сcoffee break' test that isn't anything important, just a fun diversion between the occasionally difficult tests.

GT4 also has a couple unique new features that are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things, but interesting nonetheless. Photo mode lets you put your car in a beautiful backdrop, and take snapshots of it for display. These make great computer wallpaper, but otherwise, it's not much more than a diversion. You can print out the pictures if you have certain Epson USB printers, or you can use one of many different USB memory sticks to save on and move to your PC for sharing online, placing on your PC's desktop, or printing up to hang on the refrigerator or something. The other thing is B-spec. Regular races you participate in are called A-spec. B-spec races make you the Сdirector' of a race, while the AI drives according to your commands. You can actually race regular old cup/championship races with B-spec, taking the game hands-off, so to speak. This is a great thing for those who hate the endurance races Ц including one that's 24 hours long (I believe you can swap between A and B-spec in this particular race, I haven't been insane enough to attempt it yet). Instead of actually racing it, you make your car far more powerful than the others, set up aggressive driving, and go on with your life while it wins the race for you Ц they'll even know when to pit for fuel (yes, you can run out of fuel) and new tires. It's an interesting concept though I'm not high on it Ц if I want to watch racing, I'll just turn on Speedvision.

If you've perhaps just emerged from a cave, or are perhaps new to the PS2 world, GT4 is a pure-bred driving simulation. Though it may never get technologically possible to create a truly realistic racing game, GT4 comes pretty close, and you have to drive the cars like its real. For vets, GT4 will play slightly different than before, though it won't take long for you to get used to some of the changes in car weights and braking strategies. Yes, back to you newbies, GT games have actually emphasized smart braking and turning, since you do this process more often than pure straightaway speed. Unlike a lot of games, mostly in the arcade racing genre, the brake button is merely there because a car has a brake; usually you just coast or powerslide through (this is of course not saying it's lacking fun Ц Burnout 3 is the single most amazing racing game in its genre in years). Not in GT4, where half the adventure is proper stopping and turning to go through corners at optimal speed. Races are won in the curves, not on the straightaways, and Gran Turismo 4 emphasizes this.