Tourist Trophy
It's like Gran Turismo with motorcycles! Oh, wait, no it isn't.
Published: April 13, 2006
The bike options are but a footnote to what you can do with the rider, though. In addition to unlocking new gear like helmets, gloves, pants and jackets for aesthetics, you can get incredibly precise about how the rider's head roll/pitch angle, torso roll/yaw, body lean (either at a full bank or while upright), arm/leg angle, how far forward or back on the seat they sit and lateral/vertical slide. Each of those options separated with a slash aren't combined, they're separate, making for more than 10 different tweaks to how the rider sits, leans, looks and scoots while riding. To top it all off, up to four values can be stored for easy recall as you switch between the different kinds of bikes.
While the game is split into Arcade and Tourist Trophy Modes, the latter, deeper one is actually more forgiving, and it's where you'll unlock more bikes (you start off with just a couple dozen and have the option to unlock almost 100 more) and where the bulk of the game is spent. Beyond the four license test categories (none of which are terribly difficult, but you can easily lose a couple hours just trying to get golds on all of them), you can run time trials, change out gear and run races broken down by class or manufacturer much like the GT games.
Mission Mode returns from GT4, organized so that you can pick the bike you'd like and take a test to unlock it for play during the actual races against other riders. The challenges are simple "pass other bikes within a certain number of laps" or time trial runs, but they're challenging, and they give you a nice peek at the difficulty level of the normal races. In a nice touch, you can sort by manufacturer or by the engine size, which is handy for picking out your next bike for use in the races. It's also the easiest way to muscle your way through the races, since you can usually just find out the cc requirements and sort the list to get the highest-rated bike to take to the next race.
All the time with different bikes helps you appreciate how each of them accelerates, dips into corners, handles short stops, reacts to rider movement and so on. It's more than just bikes with different brake power or more throat to them; you actually get a sense of the weight and muscle in each bike, and learn to appreciate different things about how different manufacturers build their machines. Incremental steps up from one bike to the next (99hp vs. 103hp, for instance), but the different types of bikes in wider categories do definitely show their differences right away. By the time I'd poured enough into the game to unlock the superbikes, I knew that I a) desperately wanted one and b) would kill myself in about 20 seconds if I ever actually got it.
