So Gran Turismo 4 is finally finished and has a UK release date of March 9. Boasting over 700 cars, 50 race tracks, and near photo-realistic visuals, we are, of course, meant to be wetting ourselves with excitement. But I can't help wondering, has Polyphony missed the boat with this one?
A lot has happened to racing game design since GT3 hit the shelves four long years ago. Titles like Burnout 3 and Toca Racer Driver 2 have got us all hot and flustered over beautifully choreographed collisions and physics-based damage systems. There's been a complete turnaround in how we treat our virtual vehicles. We want to personalise them, tear them away from rigidly conservative marques. Then we want to guide them into nightmarish smashes, watching breathlessly as the destructive ripple absorbs everything on the screen. The anal world of GT, where gamers pore lovingly over their pristine collections of spotless super cars seems a bit quaint.
No hang on, it seems a bit sad. Amid the seductive chaos of Burnout 3's Crash mode, we can freebase car pile-ups til we're giddy. In the daft boy racer paradise of Need For Speed Underground 2 or the darker modding ghetto of Midnight Club 3 we can, for a few guiltily provocative hours, pretend to be working class rude boyz rather than middle class effetes huffily phoning the police every time someone revs an Impreza outside our home at two in the morning.
I'm not sure that GT4's masturbatory Photo Mode - where you pose your car near world landmarks - can really compete. I'm not sure that the GT4 B-Spec mode, where you manage the pit stop and tuning strategies of an AI driver, is really going to get my palms sweating. It might have done four years ago, when the austere Gran Turismo universe made some kind of sense. But who wants sense nowadays? What place does sense have in the world?
700 cars? Get a life. Unless you can smash them all to pieces I'm not interested.
