Gran Turismo 4 (2004) (VG)

User Rating:

8.9/10   

Directors:

Kazunori Yamauchi
Tatsuya Matsue

Release Date:

22 February 2005 (USA)

Genre:

Animation | Family | Sport

Tagline:

The Drive Of Your Life.

Plot Keywords:

Sequel | Driving | Antique Collector | Still Photography | Racing

Country:

Japan

Language:

English | Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.78 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Australia:G | South Korea:All | UK:U | USA:E

Filming Locations:

Amalfi Coast, Amalfi, Salerno, Campania, Italy

Company:

Polyphony Digital

Trivia:

If the player visits the garage after winning a race, the chosen car will be facing out of the garage door. If the player visits the garage after losing a race, the car will be facing into the garage.

Goofs:

Factual errors: In the photo lab, the listing for the Brooklyn photo shoot says the Brooklyn Bridge crosses the Hudson River. The Brooklyn Bridge actually spans the East River.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Troldspejlet: (#33.11)" (2005)

Soundtrack:

Moon Over The Castle

The sad state of modern video games

Honestly, it appears that modern games makers believe nobody is going to notice how the game feels rigged against the human player if they keep said human player adjusting a million different settings to get a level of performance that is automatically bestowed upon the computer players. Sure, the game makes a big boast about how real it all is, but that's just the point. If I wanted real, I would go and drive a Holden Commodore at 100+ kilometres an hour down a Sydney highway. Real is not fun. Repeating the same race over and over is not fun. It's boring. It is a sad call on modern video games when the only driving game that improves on the fun of eight-bit magic like Pit Stop or Pole Position is the original PC version of Carmageddon.

To be fair, some of the game starts out vaguely challenging. Learning how to keep on the road with the sluggish controls is distracting for an hour or two. The problem is that as the game progresses, nothing improves. One does the same races again and again to add pieces to a car, ostensibly so it will drive faster and handle better. Then they lose their patience as the CPU's cars seem to drive 50 km/h faster, and seem to turn easier too, since they never go off the road at these speeds that will have your car spinning all over the place. Can we say "unfair advantage" or "computer assist"?

Second to the actual driving as a severe annoyance in Gran Tourismo 4 is the music. To be fair, the jukebox selections try very hard to be varied, but the small number of songs available does annoy after a while. In a roster numbering barely some five dozen or so songs, the number of techno, retard-noise tunes in it should be either zero or negative. Negative meaning the kind who can actually do something with this genre, such as Aphex Twin or Ministry. Oddly enough for a driving game, and one that claims to be *the* driving game, no less, Motörhead is nowhere to be heard.

Not having played the arcade version of the game at all, I won't comment on whether it is worthwhile playing with more players. However, if the meaning I get in my mind when we hear the word arcade applies here, it can only be an improvement. When I think arcade, the so-called realism that gets in the way of the fun quotient is stripped down or left out. Given that a few turns at playing Crazy Taxi was what convinced me to purchase a Sega Dreamcast many moons ago, I guess one can guess that I don't care how much it feels like real driving. In fact, my experiences of real driving mean that if I play a video game that involves driving, the less it feels like real driving, the better. Since I cannot even use this jerky, uncontrollable car to run people over, Gran Tourismo 4 winds up being as much fun as being beaten repeatedly with a rubber cricket bat.

Since I have to have a minimum number of lines, I will also tell you that if you think having fun involves moving in predetermined patterns, then you will love this game. Get one thing wrong, and you've basically wasted your time as well as effort. It doesn't matter if you're beating the computer opponent by a comfortable margin - walking outside the line will be penalised. Like I said, Carmageddon was a hell of a lot more fun than this.