Topic: The Gran Turismo Thread

Digital Foundry has done a fair number of video on both new and old Gran Turismo titles. These videos definitely
helped me reconnect with the series in a big way. I first played GT3 when I was about 11 on our new ps2, I mostly stuck to the arcade mode because I was too young to properly understand the progression of GT mode at that time. I was excited when GT4 launch and bought a copy on launch day but since I was way too young to drive then I could barely play the game due to changes to the driving model. I failed nearly every license test and just put that game down forever. It wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to randomly boot up GT4 again on emulator and I fell in love with the game. I sunk 100+ hours into gt4 having grown older and understanding driving better. After that I played GT5 on ps3 emu the next year and then I decided to buy a ps5 with gt7 being my first game. I know consider GT one of my favorite franchises even though I am not a car person in any sense of the word. The passion, the artistry, the attention to detail all shine through in the GT titles and gets even a non car junkie like me hooked on the series.

So if you read my long rambling introduction thank you, what are your memories of the GT series and what does the series mean to you?

Yes!! I LOVE Gran Turismo! One of it's most endearing qualities is the pomp and circumstance! I too am pretty disconnected from car culture, but Gran Turismo makes you feel like a total auto aficionado. The ~10 minute intro sequence in GT7 is audacious in the best way possible.

My first memories of the game was seeing the (double disk sized box) for the first game at the local game rental place when I was a kid. The boxart of the car being covered and it being billed as the real driving simulator was instantly iconic and dare I say "adult." That was a game for a truly sophisticated person! It wasn't until the red-box PS2 combo package that I finally got a GT game for myself and I played it well into highschool.

In my adult life I've since picked up the original to play on a PS1 RGB setup. It has NegCon support (the Namco analogue controller that twists in the center) and I have been absolutely blown away. I can't believe the fidelity of control the NegCon provides. It took a bit of calibration but it is one of my favorite gaming experiences I have access to.

Absolutely adore Gran Turismo and as someone who leans more towards the biking/walking method of transportation its actually one of the only connections I have to "cars."

It's funny, my Mom sent me scans of old letters I wrote to my family while I was working in the UK taking a gap year. I was keeping my brothers up to date on the latest games and telling them what to pick up (I knew a guy who's Dad was in the "import/export" business and would get boxes full of the latest titles - games piracy was rife in my home country of South Africa and I didn't know better):

LOL, not quite, but it did turn out to be a great game (and no, my Dad still thought games were a waste of time).

Then of course GT3 landed on the PS2 and that just blew us all away - the graphics seemed photo realistic to us at the time. Doesn't quite live of to the experience of playing Ridge Racer at home on my Japanese launch PS1, but it's up there!

I played 1, 3 sport and 7.

Really like the single player in 1 back in the day. 3 also but not as much.
Couldn't get into the. Modern one in the same way.

Couldn't understand why, was the progression different? Easier? More boring. The availability of online play too tempting?

Myself and my brother would do long 20 lap split screen races on PS1 again not something I did much of in 7.
Maybe the music was better in 1! Kept us going.
I often thought about how 4:3 is better for split screen, as you do get weird ration doing split screen on 16:9

Except for Sport, I played all the GT games, but it was only when 4 arrived that I was seriously hooked. I must've played that one for hundreds of hours, it was just extremely engaging at the time. I did play 5 and 6, but was not as dedicated to them. Lately, I was able to finally get the platinum for 7, but the grind necessary to get some of the cars I'd like kinda bums me out, so I'll probably just boot it again if I'm hankering to pull out the steering wheel and use it with PSVR2 (it's really fun and immersive, even if my set-up is as cheap as possible), but I have been thinking of revisiting 5 and 6 for the platinum as well (I did finish the online trophies at the time the games were still active).

I've been dipping in and out of the very first Gran Turismo on PlayStation and it holds up surprisingly well. I have it hooked up to a CRT TV.

I can still vividly remember when my brother brought Gran Turismo (PS1) home. It really was mind-blowing seeing it for the first time - those cars looked REAL to ~ 12 year old me. I think that was also my first experience of the Dual Shock controller (it might've even been a bundle he bought?) I'm not sure the gameplay loop was ever better than in GT1 & 2, buying a rubbish 2nd hand car, winning a few races (probably being rewarded with more rubbish cars), buying a GTO and then beefing it up to 800+ bhp so that it didn't even steer a tiny little bit. To this day I still utterly suck at driving games if they won't let me bounce round the track off the barriers... getting the flywheel so your Subaru Impreza took off like a rocket on the starting grid, get that "racing modification" that gave you cool paint and a performance boost. My failure to complete anything but the most basic licenses. The tracks seared into my brain - Trial Mountain, Autumn Ring, Clubman. Haha you think you can drive a Viper eh? Nope. What about a TVR Cerbera? Nah...stick with the GTO... responsible for me being excited to see a Mitsubishi FTO in the flesh, and why I still think Subaru Imprezas are cool. Fun, simpler times.

My main experience with Gran Turismo was my friend using me as a labour monkey to do one of those extremely long endurance races or whatever it was for him. That said, having a loan of it gave me a taste of the franchise at least and it was impressive.

Shame I never cared enough about cars to buy my own copy.

I'll always have a soft spot for Gran Turismo. I participated in a Benelux competition that was aired on tv somewhere in '98 or '99. It was the first Gran Turismo game and you had to qualify by posting your lap time on Grand Valley Speedway in a Honda Civic. The top 40 was invited to the tournament. The tournament itself was terribly organized. You had to stand in front of a screen holding a controller that was fixed to a metallic arm and the audio was turned off so your only reference for the manual shift was the rpm needle. To add insult to injury they changed the track to Trial Mountain at the very last minute. The whole thing basically became a lottery for who was affected least by all that. Sadly it wasn't me

@NetshadeX haha that's terrible!

The DF GT videos got me trying some and I ended up getting almost all of them, as well as a good range of Forza titles and some entries from adjacent racing series like F1 and MotoGP.

As a sort of experiment I put the track and car lists of all these games side by side and picked four mostly common tracks (Laguna Seca, Suzuka, Silverstone, Catalunya) and cars (Mini Cooper, Mazda RX-7, BMW M3 GTR, Nissan R390) to have a benchmark to compare the games (GT 2,3,4,5,7,PSP; Forza 1,3,7; F1 09 Wii/PSP,22; MotoGP PSP,14, 21)

My performance isn't very consistent and the specific car models a bit too different between games to meaningfully compare lap times, but for the subjective experience, I found the games have more in common than not. Across GT and Forza games, experience in one really does carry over quite well to other games, with minor differences in car handling that you mostly get used to quickly. Control scheme is a bigger factor for me, using the right stick for acceleration in early GT games feels very different, not to mention the PSP games.

That's another story entirely for the F1 and MotoGP games. The tracks are familiar but the racing experience is obviously wildly different. The F1 cars are super fast and have crazy grip. With MotoGP something seems off, I'm beating some of my F1 lap times!

So far my favourite track for this comparative racing is Laguna Seca, it's short and the first corner and the corkscrew make for good benchmarks. Suzuka is also cool but I'm inconsistent on it.

Unfortunately there are a lot of track and car combinations that I have yet to unlock, so I'm slowly working my way through the campaigns for the games. I found the event selection in Forza 7 the most fun so far, but I'm yet to dive properly into GT 7 - it's overwhelming! GT PSP meanwhile is a bit of a drag, since it's mostly just license tests and I'm terrible at those with the spartan controls on the handheld.

I remember looking at screenshots of Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec in a magazine (can't remember which one) and thinking it looked real.

I'm like you, not a car guy but enjoy the games nonetheless. Something about the slow progression is very addictive and the attention to detail is sublime.

I did get bored by GT4 so I skipped the remaining entries until GT7 - which I loved!