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Friday, February 5, 2010

Control Freak: GT PSP: My own thoughts

With my review of Gran Turismo for the PSP I tried to hold back my own personal input from the game, I wanted to deliver a straightforward review. I did add a few examples from my own personal playthrough when I mentioned the driving line and not being familiar with it, but that however was an example rather a personal injection. This blog is just my passable thoughts on the game, what I liked, what I didn't like.
The reason I try to distinguish the game review from my personal thoughts is this: The reader may not like the same things I do. In addition, the reader doesn't know me in real life, so by adding my own thoughts to the review, I taint the reader's knowledge of the game. But without further adieu, this is what I really think of GT PSP. Be warned, it isn't pretty.

GT PSP holds no new tracks, no old tracks, and no surprises. It's a copy and paste job of previous entries into the Gran Turismo series, stripped down so it's small enough to fit on a UMD.

Polyphony Digital: Do we really need 6 types of one car? (i.e. over 6 types of the Mitsubishi Lancer.) That just takes up disc space for other cars that could be used. (GTO Judge? Hello?)
And speaking of the Judge: why so few American muscle cars? It seems like a bit of a biased towards America when coming from a Japanese game developer. 

60 frames per second? Give me 30 and better track design, no pop-ups in the background, and no breakthroughs on the course. I know the PSP can handle better graphics than that.
I'm not trying to say "make a completely cartoon version of GT," I'm saying it's a release on a handheld, time to do something different. Surprise us. Wow us. Make us want to play the game.

Only 4 manufacturers at a time? Like I said in the review: it forces us to decide whether to buy this new car presented to us, or save up for the one we want. That's understandable. Problem is it's almost a rarity if you want a certain European or American car. 19 times out of 20 one of the manufacturers is either Nissan or Toyota. As I said earlier: biased much? 
I started and ended over a hundred races (without playing them) just to get the day count up to get to the next manufacturer set in hopes of finding Subaru or Chevy. 

The last DLC given to us was a set of the high price cars: Bugatti Veyron, Enzo Ferrari, GT by Citroen, etc. Cars that would take us all a while to save up for (not to mention longer to find because of the manufacturer limit). So now I have no need to save up that money to buy a Veyron. Thanks.
As for DLC: Give us NEW cars, and NEW tracks. Heck, I'd settle for old tracks (Clubman Stage Route 5 plz?) if it meant I could do something more with the game.

Why no tournament races or individual challenge races? Something separate from the Challenge Mode presented in the game. I understand it's a game meant to be played in between time periods, but you've got to make me want to play it.

What's wrong with the control stick? There is no sensitivity. I push it to the left just a little and the car fully steers left. I know it can handle differing degrees of motion because it's possible in the SOCOM games. Regardless, the physics are similar to what you find in GT4, making me think a certain department was too lazy to improve upon things.

As for the rank up system: What am I supposed to do? I've tried over 20 laps on each track, with new cars, or cars that I've never raced with, and single manufacturer races, but still nothing has changed. Are there certain hidden requirements for each track? If so, what are they because I'm lost and, literally, going around in circles trying to figure this out.

After buying a larger memory card, I found out that I was wrong about installing the game to the memory. Sure it's faster, but it eats up a lot of the battery, despite what the game manual says. . And you need at least 1GB of space to do so. Funny how the game says you needs over 200MB and the manual says 700MB. Good job lying to us. You also need to have the disc in the PSP in order to play it, much like the PS3.

Overall, unless you really want a new Gran Turismo game, and you don't want to wait until 2015 for GT5, it's a definite recommendation. Just don't expect to find this game as great as you would initially think.
(Ha, now that I think about it, it's been said that you can transfer your car collection to GT5. So if you buy every car then you're pretty much set for this game.)

Keep Playing.
But don't keep playing GT PSP, because I don't think I am.

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