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With the fifth in the series still waiting to come out on the Playstation 3, Gran Turismo has finally made its debut on the PSP.
Before you can get into the game proper, it's good to start learning driving basics with the Driving Challenge option.
Here you can score credits as you complete them, as well as during races, all of which can be spent on more cars and
upgrades, etc.
The Driving Challenge measures your acceleration and braking ability (this certainly helps, given the game's complexity),
although after a while it's easier to learn on the job, so to speak, and just get stuck in. However, I never did quite
graph what an E-Brake is... Is it a Yorkshire thing?
The real meat of this title is in the single player race. For each one you can change event options (eg. number of laps),
course options (forward or reverse, difficulty level and to toggle the guiding driving line that pinpoints the optimum
line to take and when to brake, plus car options (manual or automatic, the type of tyress and other technical aspects
I don't understand). It's also possible to view replays and save them.
Gran Turismo: In-game action Trial Mountain
After playing this for a while, although I'm just an occasional player of the GT games, one thing I do remember that its
raison d'etre is the Career mode. To miss it out just leaves it as an arcade game but with unarcade controls, making it
difficult to play until you get used to that, but then where's the benefit from doing so if there's no career upon
which to embark? A real missed opportunity and rather kills the point of the release. It can't have been difficult to
add it, surely?
Once again, there's never any collision damage in these titles and the games take so long to come out on the main
Playstation console that by the time they do, Sony have already moved on to the next machine!
Various other options include:
Multiplayer: Choose "Ad Hoc", to let you select your car and the track to race on (the latter if you're
hosting the race) and then go; or "Share & Trade", where you can connect with other drivers to share and trade cars
from your collection.
Status report: Gives you the total distance driven, total number of races won, driving challenges completed
and total credits.
Gran Turismo Theatre:
Replay all saved videos from single player events, driving challenges or the opening Gran Turismo movie. The former
is rather annoying because rather than list just the videos saved, it lists EVERY track, but if you've only saved a few
of these then you've got to click past all the others first.
In this review, I've uploaded a number of clips which are as follows:
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
