Oh snap, what I have started.
But I stand by what I posted. There are lots and
lots of racing games. I like about half of them, including NFS II and III, so I do have my occasional fling. Each one has it's own flavor, and brings it's own unique selection of entres to the meal. Some of them, like the GTR series, is rather limited in what you can race. Some of them, like Toca, are fairly diverse. Some, like Test Drive Unlimited, Project Gotham, Grid and Shift, are weird critters that you either enjoy a lot or despise with a passion.
And then there's Gran Turismo. Well, and Forza, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Gran Turismo is utterly and completely unique, because it isn't just a game that yanks pieces of the automotive world willy nilly and jams them together in an ill-fitting jumble. It's a monument to the automobile in the form of a game. As you get to know the game, you get to know the creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, and you learn that he really,
seriously loves cars, and everything about the world of cars. And in a sense, Gran Turismo is a way of him trying to seduce you into that love of cars too.
How many of us fired up GT1 or 2 and wondered, "What's with all the sports cars? And there are some wimpy ones too." (raises hand) I did. I thought it was really odd that Miatas, Civics and Celicas were in the way of all these high performance supercars and race cars. When I was getting into it and turning everything into a 300-400 hp monster or worse, a relative told me to ease up and try the cars stock, then lightly modify them, a bit at a time, and notice how they were transformed even with some minor enhancements.
And then the scales began to fall from my eyes. I saw that GT was a car encyclopedia and simulator, that tried to give you the essence of owning cars you couldn't begin to collect in real life. Not just race cars, but
every car was shown to be unique in some way. And this was why the delays between games kept getting longer and longer, as the Master tried to shape Gran Turismo into his dream game. A game that came as close as possible to real life, so that if you bought a Mustang with certain mods and took it to the Nurburgring, it would behave remarkably like the real world counterpart on that unmatchable course.
Forza is a nice try to copy a magical formula, but it's just not the same, which you expect of a copy. Dan and the others do talk a good game, about how they want gamers to understand the coolness of tinkering with cars and making them go faster and harder around a course. But the flavor is distinctly different. They won't hold the game back from release because something just isn't quite there. You can see this in the community, where the factions are pretty much taken up with the drift and touge crowd, the supercar fiends and the high performance race car nuts. While Forza has a variety of cars, it's top heavy with supercars and race cars. Very few people explore the odd rides except to see if there's an undiscovered fluke which will rocket them to the top of the hotlap leaderboards. Very few people are calling for the inclusion of the MR2 Mk I or Sileighty in a new car pack. We're overwhelmed with those wanting more muscle cars, more supercars and more race cars. And those wanting more basic vehicles are usually Gran Turismo fans.
Yes, these folk exist in Gran Turismo too. The kids and 30 somethings in the millions gravitate to the muscle cars, race cars and supercars. But a surprising number want to have their car, or their dad's car, or the neighbors car. A Volkswagen Golf, a 240SX hatch, a Celica, a Mercedes Bens 190 E. And they want to get cars in the same vein. Then they want to collect all the BMWs, or all the Skylines (raises hand).
Almost half of my massive GT4 garage consists of cars with less than 300 hp. I still have cars to collect in that game.
Yeah, it's easy to say glibly that Gran Turismo is just another racer. But you'd be missing the point by a mile.
), but a label (i.e. "fanboy") is just that. Tenacious D's arguments are usually well constructed and backed-up at least by reason and logic; if you don't agree then you're obviously free to say so, but don't attribute the reasoning simply to his so-called "fanboyism" - just that he differs in opinion from you. 👍
