The Real Disappointment Simulator
Gran Turismo finally arrives on the PSP. We almost wish it hadn't.
Published: October 10, 2009
This was all done to encourage the act of trading and sharing with other players over Wi-Fi, and in practice it sounds like the perfect way to build a stable of the 900+ cars in the game. After all, as you race on a track, you effectively accumulate experience for that track that can be plied toward your AI racer's performance. In a nod to the last PS2 GT, you can let the game effectively play itself, growing as you personally race a track and increasing earnings when pitted against more aggressive AI opponents. The problem is that all these trading and upgrading removes the sense of reward and progression of earning certain cars and graduating to either a new car or being able to tune and upgrade your existing ride to squeeze out performance.
That's easily the biggest loss in all of this. If it were a matter of just having to try to cherry pick from random dealers on a given day, that's one thing, but there's absolutely zero sense of progression among the individual rides. There's nothing like taking your existing car and dropping in a turbo or giving it a naturally aspirated tune, then dropping in a new muffler, exhaust, drive train, lightening the weight... and then getting to do it on a dream car. Tuning is core to the Gran Turismo experience, and just as it was in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, there's no upgrading to be done. Yes, you can tweak, but never swap out after-market parts to beef up your car.
This relegates the whole of your experience in Gran Turismo PSP to just... repetition. You can pick and track and any car, but the ability to buy any car in budget means there's really no restrictions to particular races, no series to participate in, no classes to advance to. What you start as in the game is what you'll end as, you'll just have more toys. But what's the good of having every toy if you don't get to really play with any of them before moving on to the next one?
There's also the odd feeling that the game isn't quite what Polyphony could have gotten out of the PSP given enough time. The car models are gorgeous, yes, and these are the tracks you saw in GT4 (the physics seem to be the same too), but there are obvious concessions made to things like sideline details. They were made, of course, at the cost of framerate, which is rock solid and absolutely a thing to behold. It's a bit off-putting to drop into the "cockpit" view and see just black surroundings (the interior likely would have looked like a blurred mess anyway, so why include it?), but there's no denying that this is the single most impressive racer on the PSP. Unfortunately, it's not a benchmark example on par with the rest of the series. It's not unfair to say that no game will look as good on older PlayStation hardware as GT games, and seeing the odd building with a messy alpha channel or a tree that's PSone quality is weirdly distracting given how good the rest of the game looks.
Fortunately, if you've got a pair of headphones, you're in for an aural delight. Not only were a decent number of songs packed onto the UMD (or 1GB download), but the engine noises when you turn 'em off are great -- though headphones will help pick up a bit of compression. Still, this is a game made to tickle your eardrums, and the sooner you ditch the soundtrack (yes, the game will eventually unlock custom soundtracks if you do enough challenges -- for which there are no other unlocks beyond more challenges, by the way), the sooner you can hear the game's audio properly.
I'm going to stop short of claiming I feel "betrayed" by what's happened to Gran Turismo, but the crushing disappointment isn't far off. Instead, I feel almost like a parent that thought so highly of their kid's morals and direction in life and then found out they burned down a hospital. I'm not mad, I'm not even frustrated, I'm just... disappointed. This could have been the game that would've held me over until Gran Turismo 5 shipped. Instead, I'm going to tuck it away now that I've reviewed it and never play it again. That's something I hope I never have to admit about a Gran Turismo game ever again.
