The All-Time Top Selling PS1 Game... but it hasn't aged well...
Written: Jun 20 '09 (Updated Dec 16 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fun for a while, good soundtrack...
Cons: ... but gets boring quite quickly...
The Bottom Line: Gran Tourismo was a great game at the time, but to me it really doesn't hold up too well these days.
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| captaind's Full Review: Gran Turismo 1 for PlayStation 1 |
The best-selling Playstation 1 game of all time with over ten million units sold, Gran Tourismo was a formidable and quite innovative game at the time. I remember playing it on a friend's PS1 years ago and being quite amazed by its graphics and depth of game play. Having recently bought a very cheap second-hand PS1 with a couple of controllers, memory cards and a few games, it was perhaps inevitable that Gran Tourismo was one of the games that I had inherited with the system.
The thing is, sometimes classic games don't age too well, and I think this is the case with GT. At first I still really enjoyed it, and the graphics despite obviously looking dated gave a terrific impression of speed. The game's menus, tracks, cars etc are reasonably detailed, and as you thrash round the tracks at high speed the slightly blocky look really doesn't matter. The sound is also very good - decent engine effects and a nice range of suitably fast-paced songs provide good accompaniment to the game. There is reasonably good array of cars to choose from or upgrade to (and seriously, how many different cars are you likely to actually buy in the game anyway?!) and a respectable number of tracks to compete on; naturally enough not all of these are available straight away.
Though there is an arcade mode that throws you straight into a race (a nice option to have, and can by done in 2-player mode), the key to Gran Tourismo's appeal is the career mode. You start off with a little cash and buy a car, probably second-hand, to compete in races. Before you can do that you have to pass at least the first of the 3 different "Driving Test" levels. In these you need to accomplish certain tasks such as cornering at high speed without going off the track at any stage, etc. These are a good challenge in themselves and make you feel that you've earned the right to take part in the races. Once you start racing, you can earn prize money that can then be used to upgrade your car. One of the things that really appealed to me about the game all those years ago was being able to buy upgraded car parts to improve performance. This is of course something we expect to see as standard in most racing games these days, but was quite an innovative idea at the time.
The trouble is, in order to buy anything that will give your car a significant boost in races, you'll probably need to repeatedly compete on the same tracks over and over, slowly building up the poor prize money for finishing last or second to last. Perhaps I'm just absolutely useless at the game (I'm hardly known for my prowess at racing games!), but in the end I just got fed up of it. There are a limited number of courses and my car always seemed to be immensely under-powered compared to all the opposition.
This leads to another problem, which may be an issue with a handful of copies out of the nearly 11 million that were sold; I couldn't change my car set-up (which could well be why I found it so difficult to compete against the other drivers). I followed the game manual's instructions carefully, but the game would never let me change my car's settings (though I could install upgrades easily enough). I got the impression that setting your car's gear ratios etc up for each particular track was an extremely important aspect of the game, so the fact that I couldn't get it to work was a major problem!
Another issue with the game, which is basically a sign of its age more than anything else, is that the 5 AI drivers have an identical driving style and little real difference between their performance in races. In fact you don't race against named drivers - just the car make and model is shown in the report after the race. To me this was also a drawback; there's no scope for building up rivalries with other drivers, you're just competing against cars.
For a while I had fun playing Gran Tourismo again, but it wasn't long before I got bored of it. Bearing in mind the possibility that I had a faulty game due to the car set-up appearing to be unworkable, I'm going to give it 3 stars. It was definitely a great game in its time, but nowadays it's significantly lacking - and I'm saying that as someone who probably spends more time playing retro games than modern ones.
Recommended:
No
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