Ok, so Gran Turismo 3 is no longer the best racing game ever.

Let's start by telling you that I bought the PSX2 for one game : Gran Turismo 3. After reviewing that for Epinions in 2002, I've spent the last 3 years killing game controllers and obsessively playing the (until now) best racing game on any platform, no questions asked.

The original Gran Turismo was the most technically superior, most accurate, most fun racing game ever. What was more amazing was that it ran on the original Playstation. GT2 was a bit of a duffer, so we'll ignore that and skip right along. GT3 A-Spec received glowing reviews all around, and rightly so. It expanded on the franchise with more cars and more tracks, and running on the PS-2, it looked w-a-y better, obviously.

Now in 2005 we finally have Gran Turismo 4, after months of delays and mouth-watering previews on demo discs and on the internet. I thought the PS2 was maxed out with the technology they crammed into Gran Turismo 3, but apparently not. Comparing 3 and 4 side by side is like comparing 1 and 3 side by side. Somehow, Polyphony Digital have managed to eak out even more graphical prowess and sound excellence in what is, by now, quite an aging console.

Graphically, it way outshines anything on any other console, including everything the X-Box has to offer. I can say this with some certainty because I had a friend come over this weekend and hook up his X-box to my projector system. Comparing all his racing games to Gran Turismo 4 on a 122-inch projected screen, the X-box seemed oddly lacking. Almost like it was the older, less capable console.

Gran Turismo 3 had a *massive* choice of cars, and that has increased in Gran Turismo 4. They claim 650 vehicles including European, American and Japanese. They have bang-up-to-the-minute vehicles, as well as some seriously old classics such as the Subaru 360 and the grand daddies of them all, the Mercedes Benz horseless carriage and the Model-T Ford! There's also a raft of concept cars including the Honda 2by2 Racer, and the Nike Concept-1. And for the first time there's trucks. It's quite bizarre to watch Dodge Ram pickups lumber slowly around the tracks. Polyphony have answered one of the criticisms of the earlier games, and for the first time in GT4, open-top vehicles have the top down, and a fully-animated driver in them. Well - some of them do. It seems if you're racing the full complement of opponents, the vehicles have the top up, but in smaller races, the top is down. I guess there is a limit to the number of polygons the PS2 can handle after all.

The cars themselves are all fully licensed and are, as usual, superbly modelled with some serious level-of-detail work going on (ie. the further away they are, the less polygons are used to make them up). All have transparent windows and all have realtime reflection mapping on the paintwork. The longer you use a particular vehicle, the duller the paintwork gets. A visit to GT-Auto will allow you to spruce up the look of the car with a car wash though. As with the previous Gran Turismo games, everything but everything is modelled on these cars. The suspension bounces, the wheels turn and have motion blur, and jump on the brakes hard enough and the front disc brakes glow with heat behind the wheels. The GT-Auto shop is still present, with even more variation on available wheels to buy, plus you can now stuff a huge wing on the back of any vehicle thanks to their wing shop.

Each car is tuneable to the n'th degree. You can upgrade, adjust, tweak, fiddle and tune everything, including but not limited to : driveshafts, clutch plates, downforces, spring rebound rates, individual gears etc etc etc. Unlike the previous titles, there isn't only a one-stop-shop for tuning, but each vehicle make has individual suppliers. I think this might be a marketing gimmick though, because there's no difference in the price of performance difference of an STI exhaust kit vs. a Mine's exhaust kit, for example. And once they're on the car, you can't tell what brand you chose. Either way it's a nice touch, even if it doesn't make any difference. One new addition to GT4 in the tuning department is Nitrous. You can strap a bottle of NoS into your vehicle and activate it when you like. It's a large bottle so it's not an all-or-nothing affair, and sparing use of it can be the difference between 1st and 2nd place when you're starting out Believe it or not, all this tuning isn't just there for show - every single item affects something about the way the car performs. It'll take you ages to find a car you like, then twice as long to tweak it until you like the way it handles. To win some of the pro races, you have no option - you must improve the cars and their "tweakables" or you'll be dead last every time. And this is the core essence of Gran Turismo. It's not just a racer, it's a simulator. It's amazing to think that as well as all the graphical prowess this game displays, it's working frantically under the hood on the physics model of the vehicle you're driving.

Polyphony have added a third camera view to GT4. The original on-the-hood and above-and-behind views are still available, but they've been supplemented with an on-the-roof cam. I'm not sure what this brings to the game really. The above-and-behind camera is totally useless as it's always been and is frankly a waste of time. The on-the-hood cam is the only one worth playing with, and the new roof cam seems to slow the game down. It's an odd choice. Personally I would have done a proper in-car cam, where you can see the window pillars and mirrors etc.

There's now 50 tracks in the game. All the originals from GT1, 2 and 3 are all here, although they've all been remodelled and retextured. The atmosphere / time of day has been changed on a lot of the old tracks too. Tracks that used to be at twilight are now rendered in full daylight which makes the game appear much more bright and vibrant. Some circuits have multiple variants, such as the long and short Autumn Ring tracks. There's a ton of new real-life circuits including racing around Seoul, Hong Kong and New York. The ever popular Tokyo Route 246 is back too. There are some new racing tracks, and some new made-up tracks. The inclusion of the original (i.e. 24 mile) Nurburgring is a stroke of genius. A couple of the new street racing circuits are in a Meditterranean setting - extremely narrow Spanish and Italian streets with towering old stone buildings either side. In one case, on the entire circuit, there's only one place you can pass - the rest of the streets are so narrow you can barely get a single vehicle down them. Of course all the tracks are raceable in both directions.
The track modelling is superb and the texture work is flawless. Atmosphere effects abound with sunflares and reflections on the road surfaces. The racing kerbs are proper 3D, not just textures. Run over them and the car handling is adversely affected. As in previous GT games, you can drive off the track until you hit something. Thank God we're not hampered with Ridge-Racer-Invisible-Wall syndrome where if you even go near the edge of the track, your car stops dead. Frankly the only way to truly appreciate the work that has gone into the tracks is to race around them in a very very slow car, or to watch the replays. At race speed, you'll have little time to admire the grass, the crowds, the flashguns in the crowd etc etc. Speaking of which - the crowd. In previous titles, the crowd was very 2-dimensional. In GT4 they've added proper 3D people close to the track. On the rally and street circuits this is particularly noticable. On the rally circuits in particular, spectators are out in the track taking photos and when you appear, they run back into the crowd. Cool.
Also in the 3D People department, the pit stops are a lot better than they were, with a 3D pit crew that services your car.

As with previous GT titles, there's great replays of each race, although they've trimmed down the replay to just 3 options now. Gone are all the confusing menus and icons, replaced with replay, display-replay, and dive-replay. The basic replay is just that - the race replayed from camera points around the track. You can switch to an in-car view and select a couple of different cameras there too. Display-replay is identical but the screen is now overlayed with brake, throttle, rev and speedo information as well as timing and position info from the race. Dive-replay is the MTV style replay with psychadelic colour changes and orbiting cameras all in time to the music. The quality of the basic replays is again such that if you saw this in a shop window and weren't paying attention, you'd have no reason to believe it was a computer game - it looks real, right down to the heat shimmer off the track and the blurring field-of-view as the camera focus changes.

The sheer volume of events available in GT4 is staggering. There are beginner, pro and expert events. Single-type events, dirt and ice rallying, street ralling, drag racing, night time racing, wet racing. Street circuits, banked ovals, true-life racing circuits. It's amazing. The original arcade mode is still present, which is fine if you want a quick race, but most players will opt for the GT mode which is where the real guts of the game lies. This is where, as with previous titles, you need to first get various licenses before you can participate in any races. In GT4 there's A and B licences, international A and B, and a sports car license. Each one has 16 tests which need to be passed, in increasing levels of difficulty. If you've got saved game data from GT3, you can transfer 100,000 credits and your A and B licenses from that game, which is enough to give you a bit of a head start. Honestly though, if I were you I'd re-do the A and B license tests. When you complete them, you get vehicles that you can either sell if you're hard up for cash, or hang on to if they're special. That's how I got the Nike-1 concept car.

The original A-spec racing mode is still present, where you race the vehicles, but in GT4 they've added B-spec mode. In this mode, you're effectively the guy sitting on the pit wall with the radio. You don't actually drive the car, but instead you issue commands to your driver. There are a number of settings for driving style ranging from relaxed to frantic, and you can issue "overtake" and "pull back" commands. You'd think that the way to win the race would be to set the driver to frantic and "overtake" and leave him to it, but your driver will make mistakes. The harder you push him, the more mistakes he'll make. B-spec doesn't sound very exciting but it's well worth looking at because it adds a totally new element to the game that we've not seen before.

The sound in the game has had Dolby Surround added to it. If you've got a good sound system, it's worth using the surround mode because it allows you a far better perspective on where the other vehicles are around you. However, like GT3, I wasn't able to particularly tell much difference between the car engine sounds. There are about 8 or 9 unique sound schemes, but Polyphony have made a big play about how every vehicle was recorded so its sound was unique. I just don't see it myself. And we've got a fully installed 6.1 sound system at home so I ought to be able to tell the differences.
The music selection in GT4 is a bit poor this time. It's very heavily biased towards heavy metal and rock music, with very little trance or techno. The titles all sound pretty similar and after only a couple of days of playing, I've resorted to turning the music off all together. It was just too annoying. Still, with the music off, you can hear more of what's going on with the cars, and it seems the rendition of wind and road noise in GT4 is much improved. If you're slipstreaming, the wind noise quietens to a whisper, but as you pop out into the clean air, you get the full rumbling whoosh of undisturbed air.

There's been a lot of talk about the multiplayer mode in GT4, or more specifically the lack of it. Whilst there is no internet play mode, there is a LAN mode where you can hook up a bunch of PS2s together and play with your mates. I don't find the lack of internet mode any problem - I can't see the point in racing with a bunch of people who you don't know - you might as well race the in-game AI. To use any internet mode, it assumes you have broadband, and broadbandreports.com still reckon only 9% of worldwide internet users have it. For those with modems, internet racing is a no-no, so the lack of this mode in GT4 isn't a problem.

One actual new addition to GT4 is photo mode, also called photo-drive. In pure photo mode, there are a predetermined number of preset positions on a couple of the circuits where you can place any vehicle you own. You can pose the vehicle and position the camera, changing all the settings including focus, zoom, field of view, exposure - everything. When you snap the photo, it gets processed and you can save it to your photo store for later use. In photo-drive mode, you have any circuit to choose from and any vehicle in your garage. You race a couple of laps, then during the replay you can pause at any point and perform a photo shoot as in photo mode. There are 64 preset cameras to choose from or you can edit any of them to be however you want them. Again shooting the photo stores it for later use. I'd read about this feature and thought it was another gimmick. In all the reviews, they mention that you can dump the photos to specially equipped Epson printers that plug in to the USB port on the front of the playstation. What I'd not seen mentioned, and what I discovered this weekend, is that in your photo store, there's an option to dump to flash drive. That's right - you can plug in a USB flash drive to the PS2 and dump all your GT4 photos to it. Then you can print them wherever the heck you like, or just use them for wallpaper on your desktop. Having discovered this, the photo mode now seems much less of a gimmick, and far more of a show of power from Polyphony Digital.

Speaking of a show of power, there is one more thing to bear in mind. As with most PS2 games, GT4 runs in 480i mode - 480 TV lines, interlaced. ie. each frame is actually only 240 lines and is interlaced with the following frame 1/29 second later. Nothing new there, but GT4 can also run in 1080i mode - HDTV, with no slowdown. That's double the resolution, which if you do the maths means 4x the amount of data being drawn on screen, and it still runs at full speed. If you've got an HDTV or a projector system, 1080i mode is absolutely the way to play this game, but be aware that it's not a permanent setting. You'll need to set the video to 1080i each time you play. I guess this is so that you don't get into the position of the PS2 outputting a video signal that your TV might not be able to display.
There is something to be aware of if you're using a projector with GT4. In the basic 480i mode, there are a couple of positions on some of the circuits where the PS2 does have trouble keeping up the framerate. On a TV this shows up as a brief slowdown in the action. On a projector, it shows up as the picture momentarily de-interlacing badly - every other line is out of sync with every other line. It's annoying but not enough to stop you playing the game like this.

And so finally to annoyances that are present. Because no game can be perfect.

(1) 4 games into the franchise and still no car damage. You can still stuff a $400,000 Mercedes GT racer into the armco at 210mph and it still just bounces off. I guess with properly licensed cars, we're never going to see true car damage. This is one area the Gran Turismo franchise really falls down now. Given the simulation aspect of the game, surely simulating car damage would be a great addition. Rubbing wings and busted-off aerodynamics would ultimately make a big difference to the car handling.

(2) 4 games into the franchise and still no engine damage. You can rev the nuts off any car and it won't damage the engine. Sit on the start line banging the rev counter off the rev limiter and the engine doesn't get hot, or explode, or drop a valve. Shame.

(3) Opponent AI. This is perhaps the biggest bugbear. Polyphony Digital have made a huge play of how they've totally overhauled the opponent AI system. All the previews talk about it but I've got news for you : it's the same as it always was. The opponent drivers all drive on rails. They tussle with each other, but they pay no regard to you. If you slow down a bit soon for a corner, the car behind will simply ram into the back of you because he hasn't reached the point where *he* wants to slow down. If you've got the inside line in a corner, the opponent AI will simply take their normal line and force you off into the grass. If you're approaching a corner and you're overtaking on the outside, as the other drivers all move over to their predetermined line, you'll get forced off on to the grass again. This is the single most incredibly irritating thing about GT4. It was there in all the previous titles, and with all the hoopla from the developers, I was hoping for more this time around. Sadly that's not the case, and it could be the thing which ruins what is otherwise the best racing game on the market.

(4) Graphical popup. I guess with the sheer volume of stuff in this game, it was inevitable that there would be some popup, where items just blink into existance. It's not bad, but occasionally you'll notice it out of the corner of your eye and it will be just distracting enough to cause you to lose concentration.

(5) No VBH. Vicky Butler Henderson did some voiceover work for the training sections of the license mode. We saw it in a lot of the rally driving previews, but now in the actual game, that voiceover has been taken out. Which is a shame because she's a babe.