Gran Turismo is definitely an excellent game. I have never seen graphics like these before. I couldn't believe the first time I saw the sunlight... that's the only game I know of where it's done properly. Complete with glare on the pavement and everything. (obnoxious while in a real car, though) The rendering is photorealistic down to real reflections of passing objects on the car windows and surfaces. And the lighting is also perfectly done. GT3 was nearly everything I'd hoped it to be, which made the following things that much more of a letdown:
1) Perhaps the biggest gripe I have with the realism is that there are no backup lights. They put in an extra button JUST for reverse gear...why not do a little bit of extra coding and put in real backup lights? That was just silly of them. I know that the previous Gran Turismo games didn't have them either, but with all the fuss about realism, it's a real oversight to not have included them.
2) The cars in this game, while great, are lacking. 150 cars? On a DVD? True, it took something like 2 weeks to encode every car on GT3 as opposed to like 2-4 days for GT2. And 150 cars is way more than a hell of a lot of other racing games out there anyway. But why are so many of them just remakes of the same damn car? It looks to me like the people were getting sloppy with modeling and just chose a bunch of extremely similar cars so they wouldn't need to do a lot of work and a lot of models. And I KNOW that more than 150 cars could've fit on that DVD.
3) The cars are incredibly detailed, down to realistic-looking spinning wheels during a race. But that was one thing that bugged me... the 2D wheels. It wouldn't have required that many extra polygons to render actual rims, or even transparent ones. And even if the performance took a hit, so what? We lose out on FPS? I heard somewhere that the framerate in GT3 is something on the order of a constant 60FPS. Let's assume that this small rendering issue knocks it down by a whopping 20 fps. Big whoop...it's still faster than the eye can see.
4) No cross-country races. Yeah, I know, GT has always been a lap-based racer at heart, but it would still have been nice to see maybe one or two in there.
5) I would've liked an option to alter the weather. This of course isn't a terribly necessary thing, based mostly on opinion than anything else, but it would've been fun to be able to do a free race around the Super Speedway in an overpowered car in the rain.
6) The game, at least to me, seems extremely slow in the beginning. I started with a Trueno and had to spend a long time running the races just to upgrade it a bit. In my opinion, it would've been a little better to make it a small amount more gripping at the beginning. It takes a real commitment to this game to get going where you want.
Keep in mind these are all opinion-based (and I didn't even mention the giant oversight of volume controls, which everyone seems to hate), so if you decide to flame me, I won't be offended. After all, I'm entitled to my viewpoints the same as you. But I thought it'd be interesting to see who out there agrees with me.
1) Perhaps the biggest gripe I have with the realism is that there are no backup lights. They put in an extra button JUST for reverse gear...why not do a little bit of extra coding and put in real backup lights? That was just silly of them. I know that the previous Gran Turismo games didn't have them either, but with all the fuss about realism, it's a real oversight to not have included them.
2) The cars in this game, while great, are lacking. 150 cars? On a DVD? True, it took something like 2 weeks to encode every car on GT3 as opposed to like 2-4 days for GT2. And 150 cars is way more than a hell of a lot of other racing games out there anyway. But why are so many of them just remakes of the same damn car? It looks to me like the people were getting sloppy with modeling and just chose a bunch of extremely similar cars so they wouldn't need to do a lot of work and a lot of models. And I KNOW that more than 150 cars could've fit on that DVD.
3) The cars are incredibly detailed, down to realistic-looking spinning wheels during a race. But that was one thing that bugged me... the 2D wheels. It wouldn't have required that many extra polygons to render actual rims, or even transparent ones. And even if the performance took a hit, so what? We lose out on FPS? I heard somewhere that the framerate in GT3 is something on the order of a constant 60FPS. Let's assume that this small rendering issue knocks it down by a whopping 20 fps. Big whoop...it's still faster than the eye can see.
4) No cross-country races. Yeah, I know, GT has always been a lap-based racer at heart, but it would still have been nice to see maybe one or two in there.
5) I would've liked an option to alter the weather. This of course isn't a terribly necessary thing, based mostly on opinion than anything else, but it would've been fun to be able to do a free race around the Super Speedway in an overpowered car in the rain.
6) The game, at least to me, seems extremely slow in the beginning. I started with a Trueno and had to spend a long time running the races just to upgrade it a bit. In my opinion, it would've been a little better to make it a small amount more gripping at the beginning. It takes a real commitment to this game to get going where you want.
Keep in mind these are all opinion-based (and I didn't even mention the giant oversight of volume controls, which everyone seems to hate), so if you decide to flame me, I won't be offended. After all, I'm entitled to my viewpoints the same as you. But I thought it'd be interesting to see who out there agrees with me.
