Note:

This is actually my first ever blog post I ever put up on my own website. According to the file I took the HTML from, this was last modified on the 26^th of June, 2022.

This maybe hasn't aged gracefully. The original website I put this post up on was designed to be a sort of parody of Web 1.0 websites. And by that I mean the original 1996 "hey look, there's text on screen" Web 1.0.

Nevertheless, I recall spending a fair bit of time writing this and it wouldn't be nice to just let it turn into lost media. However, unlike the "Max RNG Rouge Deck for Hearthstone" post I took from my own Bear Blog page, I've taken its formatting and styling away. In short, it was a LibreOffice writer document exported as a HTML page. It was ugly. Also, the images have been halved in size and run through my image optimiser app a couple times for good measure.

Please enjoy this very passionate post about Gran Turismo 4 🙂

There Will Never Be Another Game Like Gran Turismo 4

Gran Turismo 4 was one of the first video games I ever got. If I remember correctly, It was my 7^th Birthday and it was the 1^st game I put into my PlayStation® 2. I didn’t like it because it was too hard. That game went on to become one of the best selling games on the PS2.

About 16 years after my birthday, Gran Turismo 7 is released. They said it would be reminiscent of the older games and that got people excited. Little did we know, the career mode would be entirely online. So online that if you weren’t connected to the internet you couldn’t play it. Fans, like myself, were disappointed. We would only get to enjoy this game for as long as the servers for the game would exist. In the end, this game will be lost forever. It was this, combined with the vast amount of other driving/racing simulators that had the chance to thrive in the 10 years between a proper Gran Turismo release, that has made me come to the conclusion that there will never be another game like Gran Turismo 4.

I know how dramatic that sounds. Don’t misread that and think that this is a big memorial to the great franchise that was Gran Turismo. This isn’t about the series at all. When I heard “reminiscent of older games” and I saw that fancy cinematic trailer in the style of the GT4 opening my expectations shot through the roof.

A game like GT4 but BETTER?! UNBELIEVABLE!!

I think a year later I was smug in witnessing the release day fallout of Cyberpunk 2077 knowing damn well that the game would have never lived up to that level of hype. I first said it years back when I was seeing all the advertising and only got more confident with every delay they announced. Little did I know that my mates (who said “all racing games are the same” during the Sony State of Play trailer) wouldn’t be proven wrong when my supposed game of decade released.

Gran Turismo 4 is my favourite game of all time. If I ever got a new favourite game, played that all the way through then played GT4, I would say “hmm, my new favourite game is a great game, but this game slaps/bangs”. I’ve done this with Gran Turismo 6 and Elden Ring, trust me. GT4 has this way of saying “welcome home” every time you boot it up, even when you’re not actually racing. I’d say its something to do with the soundtrack and the fact that the game literally drops you onto the “Home” option in the career mode when you start the game, right after your finished watching the intro cinematic. The other games don’t really stand a chance.

Gran Turismo 4’s UI menus are designed to be luxurious in an interesting way. It uses a similar layout to the recent games, where you navigate through a map. The same can be said for the music. But what makes it stand out is the artistic choices. The whites and light greys create a softer tone which greatly sets it apart from other racing games.

This style also complements the kind of game this is. Unlike most racing, you get to see the majority of the content right off the bat. You can go through and see heaps of cars and races. What prevents you from competing in these races is the licences and the sorts of cars you choose to buy.

The licences are honestly not the greatest part of the game but nonetheless they need to be completed. Licences B, A, iB, and iA are the licences you must earn in order of difficulty. If you don’t get up to iB you will feel restricted in the amount of races you can enter. Each have 16 tests and a coffee break. The tests usually consist of section based challenges, such as how to go through a chicane, with every 5^th usually being a guided lap around a track. You will earn medals based on your times and you can fail if you do something like hit a cone or go onto the grass. Getting medals on every test, regardless of quality, will get you the licence and a trophy car. The trophy cars depend on the quality of the medals although the prize isn’t always worth it.

There are lots of different sort of races in the game, there is Beginner to Professional to Extreme events, Endurance Events, Driving Missions, Rally Events, Japanese, European, American, and Manufacturer events. In my opinion you will find that the manufacturer events are the best simply because the cars within those races, as well as the cars awarded from those races, are much more predictable. This gives some assurance since you are buying a car from a list rather than buying it because it has rear wheel drive or something as such. Outside of those events you usually won’t know what sort of cars are going to be entering the race and it can be difficult to select a car given you can’t see the sorts of cars that will enter if you don’t match up to the regulations for that event.

However, if you like earning big rewards, the Rally events are known for giving you rally cars as trophies which can be sold for extremely high prices. Not only that but you can win the prize car multiple times, there are only 2 2 lap races and you can enter with any car you want given that you have the right sorts of tires. Winning those races over and over again with a decent car is like grinding a way in an RPG. Its not the intended way to play but if you just wanted to finish the game this is probably the best way to do so. The alternative is going and doing a ton of races to get funds and getting prize cars to go into the big championship races.

You don’t see many cases like this these days where you can take easily farm currency in a video game. This sort of went out of fashion with the introduction of micro transaction that populate Ubisoft and Capcom’s newer single player games. Its not that the game companies want to be greedy and take all your money, its to boost the games profits and give a more reliable return on investments. Nonetheless, its a feature that’s going to be used by the people who think the game is too hard or slow and want it to get to the end faster.

GT4 will take you hundreds of hours to get to a point of 100% completion. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no real end goal in the game. You are just playing to get more prize money to buy new cars and enter more races. The real goal is to get better and drive as many cars as you can in the game. Its like a challenge to get the most you can out of the game now that its in your hands. Sort of like an arcade game without limits.

As part of the game, each race has a “points” rating for each race. These go from 1 to 200 based on the car and its tuning in comparison to the other cars in the race. 1 being a walk in the park, 100 meaning your car has the same performance of the other cars and its a perfectly fair race, and 200 meaning that your car has marginally less performance. That being said you can still come first in a race where you could win 200 points but it will require more skill. Someone who enjoys the challenge may want to get 200 points on all the races while someone looking for an easy win, perhaps to grind for credits, will usually get around 2 to 20 for each race. The game doesn’t require the A-Spec Points to be completed or enjoyed.

On the other hand, there are points for the B-Spec, which are used to build the skill of your B-Spec driver. The B-Spec mode is optional for most races and even has a cool feature which allows you to enter events without the required licence. It allows you to deliver commands to an AI player, such as setting the pace, when to pass and when to pit. While optional for most races, this mode will be used more so for the endurance races in the game.

As for endurance races, I haven’t played any. To access the “Endurance Events” from the Gran Turismo World menu you first need to complete 25% of the game. While completing the game doesn’t mean collecting the 721 cars, you fill have to achieve this while going through 100s of race events and acquiring the licences. I have at least created 4 different saves and only just recently, say within a day of writing this post, amassed 25% completion. I can’t say for sure but I would say it would take around 50-60 hours if you weren’t gunning it. And after you done all that to get access to this new category of races, you will learn that some of those races will 24hrs to complete. There’s no saving in that 24hrs either. Either you play for the whole 24 hours or you pause the game and leave the PS2 going until you come later. But don’t worry, the prize money for those races are in the hundreds of thousands, even for coming second.

Even though I never got around to playing those endurance rounds, I really appreciate the amount of commitment being made to the tagline “The Real Driving Simulator”. With the inclusion of these races, you can go from an arcade style racer, to a serious simulator where you get to experience real world racing events. To bad if I even had the intention of trying out one of those events I would be running the risk of (finally) killing my poor old PS2 slim once and for all. But I guess there are always the 4 hour events if you don’t want to get too hardcore.

I think the main thing I miss from GT4 is the act of progression in the game. Its kind of like an RPG but with cars and races instead of items and battles. You get the items you need for some section of the game, you tackle a few challenges, and at the end you're rewarded. In GT4, the reward is in the form of a trophy car which you get after completing a championship, all the races in a single event, or after completing all the driving challenges to earn each licence. After completing each race you of course get a sum of credits but I find my motivation comes from finding out what car I get when I've finished all the races. It's the thing that makes you want to go through the game completing all the races. More importantly, the trophy cars are usually cars that you are not allowed to buy from the manufacturers and it goes without saying that those are the cars you want in your collection.

Unlike a lot of modern racing games, GT4 is filled with unique and interesting cars from motoring history. I like to think that the progression system in this game is specially designed for motoring enthusiasts. Its in the way it directs you into purchasing all different kinds of cars.

As you could probably tell by know there is also a very well made photo mode that allows you to take photos. You can switch to a photo mode anytime during the viewing of saved replay data or "photo drive" mode or you can take a more stylistic photo in a "World Tour" photo mode.

Both modes let you select from multiple angles. The "Photo Drive" or during the replay, you have 64 different angles although all angles past a certain number are simply set angles around the car rather than the "wider" angles that populate this page. In the "World Tour" photo mode you have the freedom to place your car and camera anywhere you want in a set of predefined areas, along with the option to rotate either on a horizontal axis.

In both modes you can alter the height, zoom, rotation and panning on the camera as long as it doesn't pass a set of boundaries. You can also set focus, white balance, aperture, shutter speed, focus, filter and so on. Very impressive for the time.

More impressive yet, each image is saved in a much higher resolution than a PS2 can produce (except for maybe the NTSC version). EVEN BETTER, and something I am grateful for in the writing of this post, you can export photos directly to USB, given that you have a USB with a relatively old storage technology. Unfortunately, you can't do the same with replays but as far as PS2 games go, this feature sets it apart from the rest, at least for any console game released in 2004.

With all that said, I would like get back to the point I was making. That there will never be another game like Gran Turismo 4.

Gran Turismo 4, besides from being greatly popular, was a game that went as far as it possibly could to achieve its goals. From getting the most out of PS2 graphics to the vast amount of content it had available; it aimed for the stars and fairly well got there. Even during the lifetime of the PS3, it was hard to say there was any competition for such an achievement of a game. PS4 and PS5 have come close, I can't say that Forza is too bad either but they don't hold that same passion you see in GT4. As we move further and further into the future, games are becoming more expensive to make, brands are harder to buy and talent harder to find. The chances of another Gran Turismo game to fulfil all our expectation will likely never come to be. As far as I'm concerned, at least for racing games, I've already come to terms that Gran Turismo 4 might as well be the best I will ever play. I'd be pleased if I happened to stumble across another racing game that makes me feel the same way but I've decided that I'm going to stop looking for my game of tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. This has been the first post to my "low effort" blog. I'm sure there are others out there that have their own game that, like me, refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything better ever existing.