This review originally appeared in E147, March 2005.
Do these words mean anything to you? E-type. Wankel. Integrale. Suzuka. Rascasse. Mille Miglia. If they don’t, you can probably skip the rest of this review, because even if you love videogames, Gran Turismo 4 will most likely leave you cold. If, however, they stir the oil that runs thick in your veins and inspire lofty thoughts of automobile history and the glamour and daring of motorsport… well, you too can probably skip the rest of this review, because Gran Turismo 4’s lavish hymn to the motor car will most likely consume you, irrespective of its shortcomings as a videogame. And it has to be said that those shortcomings are serious, and they are old.
Not all of them are of Polyphony Digital’s own making. GT4 is poorly served by the DualShock2. Steering is a little twitchy, and neither the right stick nor the analogue face buttons provide as sensitive, ergonomic and intuitive a control system for throttle and brake as a pair of triggers with decent travel. Balancing the car on the throttle, gently feeding the power through a bend is possible with practice, but desperately lacking in feel or precision. They’re adequate controls, but in a game whose very raison d’être is car control, adequate is nowhere near enough. Those willing to invest in a force-feedback wheel, however, will be richly rewarded.
Then there’s the curse of the ‘real driving simulator’ genre that Gran Turismo invented, a conundrum created by its tuning element: how can you produce a rewarding and progressive challenge in a racing game where players can simply buy speed? Often, races in GT4 – the random battles in its motoring RPG – can either be won with ease by the third corner, or not at all. Fail, and you’ll have to exercise supernatural restraint and prescience when shopping for new parts if you don’t want to annihilate the competition on your second go. Chasing a close, exciting race almost becomes its own game, but it’s one you’ll have to design the rules for, blind, yourself. It’s a balancing nightmare, and it’s debatable whether it’s soluble at all, but some token compromise – tighter horsepower restrictions, say – ought to have been reached by now.
There’s another, closely related culprit in GT4’s unfulfilling sport, though, and this time Polyphony has no excuse: the bovine AI. Truly lifelike CPU drivers in videogames are still some way off, but by now the vast majority display more aggression, competitive spirit and general awareness of their surroundings than these meek cattle. Bump into them and you’ll expose another yet another old flaw: damage or no damage (and, once again, there is none), impact physics that fail to convince or punish ought to be a thing of the past. In Gran Turismo’s fossilised design, already hopelessly encumbered by its own tradition, they’re not.
It’s baffling that more hasn’t been done to address these problems – especially given the delay to the online mode that will render most of them moot – and it’s also baffling that they don’t really matter. Polyphony head Kazunori Yamauchi’s stated intention is not to produce the ultimate videogame about driving, but the ultimate real-world driving experience on videogame hardware, and in this respect GT4 eclipses its predecessors and its competition with some ease. The handling model can seem dry after Project Gotham Racing 2’s tactile, tyre-smoking exuberance, but the feedback and physical detail are unsurpassed, the satisfaction in smoothly nailing an apex immense.
And then there is that overwhelming pantheon of cars, 700 strong. Alongside every current production car you can think of you’ll find a scholarly selection stretching back through ’80s wild children, ’70s cult favourites and ’60s glamour pusses to the Model T Ford and, incredibly, the 1904 Daimler-Benz Motor Carriage – as well as forward to progressive hybrids and fanciful far-future concepts. Crushingly, many cannot be raced (probably due to an excess of polygons in open models), but all can be gazed at in their exquisitely rendered glory, coveted, and compulsively collected. And all of them can be driven, in a very close approximation of the real experience. It’s an obsessive, academic achievement of biblical proportions: no less than an interactive study of the whole history of motoring.
The same philosophy applies to GT4’s library of tarmac. The majority of the original tracks here have been familiar for seven years now, and (excepting a few thrillingly evocative tarmac rally stages) more effort has gone into transcribing real-world circuits than crafting virtual ones. It’s a mouthwatering roster: the mighty Nürburgring, somehow lacking the sweeping grandeur of its PGR2 incarnation, but with a more claustrophobic, scary, and viciously bumpy ride; the snaking bends of Suzuka’s breathless figure-of-eight; and, albeit under assumed names, powerfully atmospheric renditions of the most romantic venues in motorsport, Monaco and Le Mans. It’s a privilege to have free run of these legends, but if course design is the heart and soul of the racing game, it’s a shame to find Polyphony still so reluctant to contribute to the canon, seemingly more interested in humbly and painstakingly tracing the work of others.
There it is: Gran Turismo 4 is fundamentally unconcerned with furthering the art of the videogame. This titanic franchise, this critical, load-bearing pillar of the house of PlayStation, is barely even a videogame at all. It’s a hobbyist software suite, a racetrack tutorial, an encyclopaedia you can get in and drive off. Perhaps that makes it a fitting flagship for the company that coined the evasive term ‘computer entertainment’; but however you look at it, it’s a labour of great love and erudition, and indispensable to those who care.
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