Driving home from work Friday I decided that I had to have GT4. I blame Autoblog. Of course, I’d be needing a Playstation 2 to go with it, and perhaps an HD A/V pack as well. Securing a copy of GT4 was easy enough — pretty much everywhere I looked had plenty of stock. PS2s and HD packs, however, seem to be as rare as unicorns. None at Costco. Sold out at Toys R Us too. No love at Walmart or Target either. In desperation I even tried a used CD / head shop. Heck, even BestBuy.com is out. The Xbox is in short supply too. WTF?
I was reduced to begging my “kid” brother to let me borrow his PS2… And it was worth it!
The graphics are just phenomenal, with lots of little touches like the sunlight reflecting off the asphalt, and as best as I can tell there’s no significant differences between running in a race and watching the replay. The physics are more realistic than any video game I’ve ever played — building a > 500HP ride and running through courses on sheer brute force will not take you very far. Even in B-spec mode.
Adjusting the settings on the cars seems to be critical in GT4. With GT2 you could simply buy the upgrades and the car would perform better; I never bothered to tweak anything except the gear ratios when acceleration was needed more than speed. With GT4, adding the top-level handling options made my mid-engine cars (’97 MR2, ’80s Espirit) significantly more difficult to control. I ended up giving them a smidgen of downforce, a tiny bit of traction control, and a healthy dose of understeer control to achieve a controllable balance, but being dependent on driving aids feels like cheating to me… Guess I’ll need to look around for a guide to tuning the suspension settings — all those numbers are voodoo to me.
I am so damned hooked that this morning I was seriously considering taking a sick day…
Andy — THE MAN — managed to track down some PS2s yesterday, so at least I have one of my own now. Gotta pick up a memory card tonight, and start hunting for that mythical HD pack…
Too bad that the new “PS Two” design isn’t compatible with my PS One LCD, I could have taken GT4 to work with me!
