“Go with the flow” – Gran Turismo 4

[For this guest post, I have the pleasure of introducing for the first time Kurt Lewin. You can find Kurt on twitter as @Angry_Kurt, and on the podcast he co-hosts, @NeverWatchers]

Gran Turismo 4 (GT4) marks the first and only time I have ever been told off in a shop. After the incredibly popular Gran Turismo 3 (GT3) which released 3 years earlier in 2001, there was a lot of anticipation for GT4 and I was in the driver’s seat of the hype train for it.

Back then most of my gaming news came through gaming magazines, and through various mags I read of how the game was suffering from delays to its originally planned 2003 release date. The Gran Turismo series is no stranger to delays and GT4 was no different, experiencing around a year and a half of delays. This made a young Kurt very annoyed; back then I was not sensible enough to see the merit of a delayed game. I wanted GT4 and I wanted it now!

Finally, I read of a final release date in PSW magazine, so I marked it on my calendar in anticipation. Come day of release there were rumours flying around the playground that it had been delayed again, as it was not in stock of the local supermarket that morning. So I trudged to my local Blockbuster after school where I had my pre order placed, expecting inevitable disappointment once again at the hands of series director Kazunori Yamauchi. But I was wrong, I walked into the shop to see that Ford-GT-graced case staring back at me. They had it in stock! Celebrations ensued within the Blockbusters with genuine cheering and high fiving my best mate; I was elated. The shop assistant however was not amused, telling us in no uncertain terms to calm down, which I did immediately as I wanted to be on their good side to sell me the game.

I went home and proceeded to play the career mode all weekend and for weeks and months beyond. Looking back now at how I felt about the game, I would say it was more of the same. In many cases for games this can be a negative thing, but for GT4 it was fine by me. I was more than happy to have the same experience as GT3 but with more cars, more tracks and shinier graphics. All of which it fulfilled. GT4 continued the series tradition of being at the cutting edge of console graphics. In 2004 these graphics were frankly mind blowing. So incredible in fact that I spent a considerable amount of time in the photo mode, which was new to the series. The car count was upped considerably, from 181 in GT3 to 722 in GT4. Furthermore, the number of tracks increased from 34 to 51. To petrolhead gamers around the globe this game was staggering and hence no wonder it generated the hype it did and went on to sell as well as it did, becoming the third best selling game on PS2.

There were some disappointing aspects to the game however, which consequently may have led to it not selling quite as well as GT3, even though I didn’t really acknowledge them at the time. The first being that the career mode was pretty much identical to all the previous games. Get your licenses, race in various events for credits to buy better cars which enable you to race in higher category races, rinse and repeat. You could argue that there is only so much you can do with a racing game’s career mode progression, but it really did feel like it was lifted straight out of GT3. Even some of the events names were the same and always have been like ‘The Sunday Cup’ and ‘The Clubman Cup’.

The other disappointment was the lack of cosmetic damage to cars. Despite the game’s realism, any crashes still felt like you were just riding around in bumper cars, which also meant it would be a common tactic to just crash into other drivers at full speed going into a corner, which would knock them off the track and slow you down sufficiently to take the corner easily, with no penalty. This led to many an argument with friends whilst playing the local multiplayer. The number of cars on offer makes this more forgivable from a technical standpoint, but it was still disappointing that other games of the time had damage models whereas GT4 showed not so much as even a scratch on cars.

I had a lot of fun with GT4, though. Despite my previous criticism about the stagnant career mode, I enjoyed the gameplay loop of unlocking new cars and upgrading them (my favourites being my souped up concept car, the Cadillac Cien and the Jaguar XJR9) and a special mention should also go to the soundtrack which made ripping around all the tracks even more of a blast with tracks like Franz Ferdinand’s “Michael”, Queens of the Stone Age’s “Go with the Flow” and Kaiser Chiefs’ “I Predict a Riot”. For me GT4 is yet to be surpassed – maybe that is nostalgia talking, but I remember being disappointed by Gran Turismo 5 in a major way. To me it transitioned into more of the same again but in a bad sense. It was on a new console in the PS3 but other than the graphical upgrade didn’t do anything better to GT4: still no decent damage model, the same career structure and only a couple of hundred extra cars, plus there was the whole farcical situation of car models being standard or premium with the standard models being taken from GT4. GT4 was where the series hit the peak of what it was doing and trying to achieve amongst the racing competition and I hope one day it can return to those heights.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 12 March 2005:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Top of the charts for week ending 19 March 2005:

• 

• 

• 

• 

•