Surpreendente para a época

1997 e um jogo que te dá mais de 100 carros com inúmeras formas de tunning de performance e que possui mais de 10 pistas não tem como ser ruim, isso é um fato. Na época, não tinha nada que chegasse perto de Gran Turismo, até mesmo pq a proposta mais simulador, só tinha de fato sob o "capô" do exclusivo do Playstation. Need for Speed, Test Drive, Ridge Racer, todos esses e muitos outros eram mais arcade e simples.

Entretanto, o primeiro Gran Turismo, que abriu as portas para essa franquia ser o que é hoje, é um jogo apenas legal hoje em dia. Com toda certeza desse mundo é um game que vale a pena ser experimentado. O fato de você ter que desbloquear seu caminho através dos testes de direção era uma parada bem legal, mas que hoje em dia, pra mim, é cansativo.

Tunar os carros é muito simples, mas se você não souber configurar o que você acabou de instalar, você terá alguns carros bem desbalanceados que, em determinadas curvas, podem rodar com muita facilidade.

Atrelado a isso da dirigibilidade, alguns carros, mesmo sem nenhum upgrade, possuem uma direção bem estranha e chatinha de pegar o jeito.

De resto, o jogo acerta em bastante coisa. Não é vazio, pois apresenta tipos de corrida diferentes para carros de determinados países e por aí vai. Inclusive isso é uma coisa que instigaria você a ter outro carro daquele pais ou daquela especificação para testar, já que você pode ter muitos carros na garagem, mas como eu disse antes, muitas coisas não me pegaram tanto hoje em dia, fiz os testes de direção, competi nas ligas (com muito save state na corrida de 60 voltas da Gran Valley) e tive alguns bons problemas com a dirigibilidade que me fizeram querer terminar com muito mais rapidez.

I mostly played this because the OST for the japanese version slaps really hard and I wanted to know what sim racing was all about since I'm mostly an arcade racer sort of guy. All in all, I'd say this was pretty eye-opening to play. More realism and less arcade wackiness means that taking corners involves properly balancing your car and not just ripping through drifts like an insane person. While I personally still believe that arcade racers are more entertaining due to their focus on fun over realism, I definitely still think that both genres have their place in the gamer world with their own unique personal appeals. I enjoyed what I played, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with a PS1 lying around that likes cars.

Played on the Duckstation Emulator on PC using an Xbox One controller. The physics and handling model aged much better than I had expected them too. Fun car selection. I'm pretty fond of the lack of tracks, it actually allowed me to learn them all and start to master them. Disparity in AI car difficulty is races is pretty rough. Also, putting a big turbo on a car makes it take over 10 seconds to get out of 1st gear? There had to be a more elegant way to do that, extremely frustrating. All in all a pretty amazing first effort when you consider the landscape of racing games at the time of its creation. It's pretty barebones but does everything you want it to do rather well.

I loved this game through and through. I'm a big petrol head and I loved this game just as much as I love GT4 as a kid. It was fun to race with my gf watching me and she would suggest how to make my car faster and better and we had a great time working our way through the game. It was great fun all the way through and I made sure to complete as much as I could until my file was corrupted and I couldn't progress after completion of the GT World Cup. Otherwise, I would have 100% of this game and collected all the cars.

An astonishing achievement and clear labor of love given the level of detail and simulation - way ahead of its time. There are over 100 authentically recreated real world cars! I'm not really a racing game guy - that has to have been unheard of for a '90s console game, right?

The manual is essentially a physics textbook, which is hilarious, but for all the complexity of the rigorously realistic design, the actual racing is kind of easy and exploitable. The two in-depth single-player modes are great, and the scale of the marquee simulation mode is staggering, resembling much more modern games in its open-endedness and customizability. Lot going on here!

I have to imagine that people were floored by this when it came out. Set aside the phenomenal graphics on PS1, the vibe is so choice. I'm only just playing it for the first time now but that opening cutscene was giving me chills.

It's adorable!
Okay, what I mean is that you can tell just how much everybody involved in this game cared about getting absolutely everything perfect, and it's an astonishing accomplishment given what they had to work with. It was probably the best looking console game ever made to this point (Final Fantasy VII was earlier in the year, and at its best it definitely looked better, but the overworld in that game was very famously low-poly triangle people walking across jpegs). And as someone who has a pretty good amount of technical familiarity with the Japanese cars of the 1990s this game's roster is based off of, the way that they have painstakingly recreated the details of them is really clear and gives the game this incredible sense of texture. The basic feel of the game was there right in the first one (provided you buy the expensive tires for cars, cars in this game on their stock tires turn into hilarious understeer-ers).
All of that being said, the difficulty curve in this game is all over the fucking place. The license tests are the hardest part of the game, and there are no upper limits on power for most of the events (there aren't actually any explicit ones but there are some de facto ones because of car restrictions). So you'll go from having a reasonably hard time to start the game in the B-tests, then sleepwalking through the early stuff, then tearing your hair out for the A and International-A license tests, and making everything from there on feel much tamer. The car roster is genuinely quite limited, though if you're going to make a game pretty much entirely out of one setting's cars, 90s Japan isn't half bad (I would do unholy things for an 80s German car game) and the track selection is small enough that you know every one like the back of your hand by the end of the game. All of these however are problems of budget (licensing) and of technology (getting the AI to be tougher in a way that doesn't involve insane rubber banding), the core was there, a core that I'm excited to see perfected as I play other games in the series.

Played on a PS2 Fat

Now, I am not a racing fan. The only racing games I've really played was Mario Kart and Forza and I'm good at Mario Kart, but I literally couldn't win a race online in Forza. I've hardly played any realistic racing games is what I'm saying, and while I know Gran Turismo is like kinda a mix of simulation and arcade it's realistic for me. Just wanna let you guys know I know very little in this genre.

I really enjoyed this game. I was super frustrated at first, as I couldn't win any races and I didn't understand how literally any of the mechanics worked. But I slowly learned and learned, I started passing the licenses easily and winning races. The learning curve is truly masterful, really feels good to finally understand how to do a sharp turn. It's also notable even after learning how to win, races are still thrilling and fun. I never lost that sense of intensity.

The car selection is huge, especially for a PS1 game. I know the second game is even larger but I haven't played anything else in the series yet. All the cars are cool and feel different. There are like 5 sections of different types of vehicles I think, and each is like a completely different planet. Even changing between cars that are the same type is a noticeable difference. I'm not a car guy at all, but the cars in this game are pretty cool as well. Modding your cars is also a nice feature and adds depth.

I just wanna talk about the soundtrack for a second, the soundtrack is fucking killer. Literally almost every song is fucking great, really makes you wanna race. Even the menu music is super good, and how every dealership has their own unique music, and all of them sound great. I love this soundtrack.

I only played the traditional mode, where you start out with some cash and buy a shitty car, then build your way up through gaining licenses and winning cups. It has a great flow to it and is a lot of simple fun.

The maps were somewhat simple cause y'know, there's only so much they can possibly do, yet somehow each map feels distinct and you'll know every map by heart after some time playing. This game also looks great for a PS1 game, one of the best graphically I've seen.

All in all, Gran Turismo is a legendary racing game and has a lot to offer, it's aged quite well I think and I'd highly recommend it. Play it.