#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW ARCHIVE#
#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW FULL#
#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW PS2#

However, should you stray more than an inch or two from the tarmac, the game will instantly fail you and send you back to the start of the test. For example, several of the tests for the easiest licence involve 'guide laps', where you follow a misleadingly-named pace car (misleading because its pace is dictated by you, not the other way round) around a particular course, ostensibly in order to learn its layout. Other elements of the licence tests serve to further emphasise their irrelevance to the main game. If anyone can explain why this is a good idea, WoS would like to hear it. Nevertheless, GT4 makes you perform this pointless exercise over and over again until it deems you fit to join the game proper. This information is, of course, of absolutely no use in the actual game, since in the game you never have to stop within a marked area, you probably won't be driving that car, the track is rarely straight for 1km at a time, and in any event it doesn't have lines painted on it every 100m to tell you where you are.

#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW FULL#

All you're left with is a series of increasingly annoying trial-and-error guessing games, where you race up to (say) 900m of a 1km stretch, apply full brakes, discover that this doesn't stop you in time, then restart the test and try again, this time braking from 850m, then 800m, then 750m and so on until you find the right point for that particular model of car. However, each test takes place in a different car, with entirely different acceleration and braking properties, so it's impossible to apply any accumulated knowledge to each successive test. You might assume, for example, that the point of having four 'accelerate in a straight line and then stop' tests, each over a longer stretch of track than the previous one, is to teach the player about the longer braking distances required at higher speeds. The point of forcing the player through this excruciating tedium is especially hard to ascertain if you look at it in any depth. Because we hate you, and because we can.' 'You want the fun you paid for? Wade through all this shit first, you scum. It's the gaming equivalent of those ever-longer unskippable bits at the start of DVDs, full of idents, corporate cockstroking, screenfuls of convoluted copyright warnings and laughable 'anti-piracy' threatverts. So immediately, having paid your money for the dizzyingly vast amount of driving content in GT4, the game won't let you actually play any of it (well, except for a tiny handful of pointless 'Arcade' and beginner races) for at least an hour and a half because it isn't sure that you understand the concept of acceleration. It's possible to load in saved licence data from GT4 Prologue in order to skip this section, but not from any of the other GT games. The first and most basic of these comprises a daunting 17 little lessons, and of the first eight of these, no fewer than FOUR involve simply pressing the accelerator and brake buttons (no steering required) in order to drive up a short stretch of track in a straight line and then stop within a marked area.

To start playing the bulk of GT4's main game, you once more have to go through a series of 'licence tests'.

#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW PS2#

Despite the fact that we're on at least the sixth game in the series (including spinoffs like GT4 Prologue, of course), and despite the fact that approximately 50% of all PS2 games are driving games, GT4 insists - like its ancestors - on treating the player as a dangerously retarded dimwit who's never seen a motor car before and doesn't really understand the concept. The first thing you discover on booting up GT4 is that it thinks you're a cretin. It probably took as long to build that one shiny car as the whole of Manic Miner. This may or may not go to show something terribly significant, but it's not important right now. But not a single fact or detail of it remains in consciousness.

All reason and belief suggests that it was. It must have been played, to some decentish length.

#GRAN TURISMO 4 PROLOGUE REVIEW ARCHIVE#

But of the series' debut on PS2, all searches of your correspondent's mental archive come up blank. The foreboding, blossoming into pleasant surprise, of the sequel is as clear as if it was yesterday.

The anticipation, followed by crushing disappointment, of the first game remains fresh in the memory. Oddly, your reporter recalls absolutely nothing of Gran Turismo 3. It's kind of sobering to realise all of a sudden one morning that the best part of your life has been an exercise in futility, viewers. Gran Turismo 4 is the cheap baked beans of videogaming.

Gran turismo 4 prologue review