Gran Turismo 4 is.... more of the same... At least from a gameplay design perspective. It doesnt try to make anything revolutionary, besides the amount of cars and its details, which again, they are INCREDIBLE for a 2004 PS2 game. Im start to thinking Poliphony Digital is at the same level as Naughty Dog in terms of optimizing their games and make it run in a barebones hardware, if not, even BETTER. Gran Turismo 4 looks like a PS3 game and for a more or less early PS2 game this is just SO MUCH. There is a reason why i always use Poliphony Digital or Naughty Dog games as a reason of why other games of the competition could hypotetically come to the PS2 even if the PS2 haters seem to disagree with me.... like Half Life 2. In fact, i would argue GT4 may be the first game in history to feel photorealistic at times. If you play on the proper display and see the replays you will know what i mean. In my school they always said that we need more powerful specs to achieve better graphics and that GPU are needed and raytracing and blah blah blah, but is true that nowadays most devs dont care about optimization anymore, or at least not at the level of the older games. Thats may be one of the reasons why i hate modern gaming, but thats a topic for another day. Like i honestly believe that graphics in videogames as a whole never needed to get any better than the cutting edge sixth gen, we need to start to focus on optimization and consumer price instead and learn it in the hard way and GT4 is one of those games that shows that you dont need specs or expensive hardware to be technically revolutionary. Like i said in my Crash review, if we could achieve photorealism with fixed cameras and hacking somehow the OS to add extra horsepower on a 20 year old PC, by all means do it.
Is a shame that the rest in this game isnt at the same level of quality.... like... any GT...
Well, i wouldnt start to launch the bombs for now, lets start talking about the good aspects, ok? Well, like i said before, unmatched graphics that still looks great, and speaking of which, i really like the intro since with the opera song and all of the chorus it gives you a sense of ambition this game would gonna have, every shot of the game intro represents this game would gonna look insanely good (even thouh is just a bunch of prerender FMVs), and the overall presentation of the menus really reflects that, GT4 presentation and sound effects is basically the closest we had to Jesus coming back to Earth! The handling of the cars are actually not that bad and are a step up from GT2, however there is an awkard feeling of the car not present in GT2 and GT3, i think it has to do with the new camera system which for some reason they decided to make it as stiff as possible, and i like the new tyre heat system, since now is present in all of the races, not matter if they are endurance tests or not. You can also change the car spoil which is cool... a bit late, but cool anyway and like the other ones you have so many cars and now they are from many eras, even from 1880. A photo mode that it was probably ahead of its time, and some few more options that arent worth mentioning, but again, they are good enough. But now..... the bad.... oh man... get ready.
The main problem with this game is its unbalance nature, both for rewards and events distribution. The licenses, while repetitive, like GT2 are managable, so i wouldnt criticize this (except the coffee break, they should be more of it imo), but after beating all of the licenses and playing some races the problems begins... again... the same ones from Gran Turismo 2.... The grinding of this game at the beginning is horrible. At least if you dont buy a good car, you would struggle to beat some races, and the ones that you can beat they would give you nothing. But after all of that grind, i winning an special condition race, and guess what.... they gives you a 900HP car: the Caddillac... Yep, thats how broken this game is. With a Lancer Evolution 1 of i dont know, 200HP, i obtained one of the best cars of the game, from the beginning. The broken nature of this game doesnt end here, since there´s also events where you can sell cars for 250.000 money. I dont have a problem with this if it was more later in the game, but since all of the races gives me like 600-1000 money, i would expect a more balanced distribution. The events also have the same problem as GT2 and there are so many... MANY filler events that gives you pathetic rewards and repeats the same tracks over and over again, and yep, the return of the endurance races..... good lord..... good lord.... GOOODDDDDD LORRRRRRRRDDDDDDD 4 hours races? 8 hours races??? 24 FUC hours RACESSS!!!??? And there are not only one, but MULTIPLE of it!? OMG.... this game feels like a flanderization of the previous entries. The developers just doesnt seem to respect your time.
And the realistic nature of this game is only be accounted only when the developers seems to care about it, because the AI of this game is horrible, not being able to notice you, being able to making unrealistic shortcuts without being penalized (like the one in Fuji Speedway or La Sattre) or simply starting to crash into walls to gain more speed and not recieving enough speed reduction or just damage your car. My philosphy to making a good realistic game is that if you fail at some of the very core features, the realistic racing game would feel even more unrealistic than a simcade or even an arcade racer since maybe those tries to be unrealistic on purpose for the most part, but they are consistently in that regard, and i saw arcade racing games that had the core features a simulation game needs, like car damage. So you have to worry less in Gran Turismo to crash than in a Burnout game.... A consistently unrealistic game would always be more realistic than an unconsistently realistic game... No pun intended. Even you can crash the AI car to push it into the sand and win the race more easily or using cars of 900 HP in 200-300 HP races that makes the game easy as hell, something GT2 fixed it.
Also, no racing modifications... WHY?! It was so cool to turn almost any of the 500 cars in GT2 into a damn machine..... They waste the opportunity...
And for last, the B Spec mode breaks the game. Nothing more to say.
Overall, while i only played GT1, GT2, GT3, GT4 and GTPSP, of these four, GT4 is the worst i played of the bunch. While some flaws were also present in GT1 and GT2 as well, like the bad AI, this is a much more advance console, and the developers, again, seems to only make the game a showcase, more of a technical demo of what the PS2 can make, but without the overall design and fun, this is just another bland, repetitive racer with a lot of balance issues. Most people may being in love with all of its graphics, presentation and amount of cars which even today racing games would dream on it, but if im honest, presentation would never trick my eyes. I saw in the past some games with 10/10 graphics and presentation but with a gameplay that was below the 2. Im not saying GT4 is that bad, i think it still can be somewhat fun in short sessions, but you know the drill.
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