Gran Turismo PSP

My guess is that the developers at Polyphony have spent a lot of time eating cake, going to visits to the zoo and taken long naps. I really can't draw any other conclusions. For after seven hours with Gran Turismo PSP the question "What have Polyphony done during all those expensive years of development?" pops into my head. The answer evades me. Because spending five years and nine months finishing a game like Gran Turismo PSP, which to 86% is based on an already existing game (Gran Turismo 4) has to be seen as rather strange, no matter how you feel about Polyphony as a studio.

Working on Gran Turismo PSP has been a process that has demanded a lot of time, studio figurehead and passionate racing freak Kazunori Yamauchi has said several times in the past. I don't really understand why. Gran Turismo PSP is nothing except a Gran Turismo 4 with worse graphics and only a fraction of the content that the Playstation 2-version had. What took so long? Perhaps Sony refused to send them a PSP to work with, so they had to work in the dark, or they had vacation for 300 days each year. I really don't know.

Compared to Gran Turismo 4, Gran Turismo PSP has no career mode. None. This is a huge disappointment and one of the major weaknesses the portable version has. The open map with all those lovely racing events is gone, the possibility to mess around with your cars has disappeared with it, at least to the same level as in Gran Turismo 4. In other words, the core of every good Gran Turismo-game has not been included.

Just like Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Gran Turismo PSP is a "light version" of the real Gran Turismo concept, where a few minor challenges make up the the actual game. When you've finished these "driver licenses" you can play some single player competitions, race against a friend in Adhoc Party or... or just not play Gran Turismo PSP at all.

To be honest, it's really hard to recommend Gran Turismo PSP to anyone, even though it works fairly well when you hit the asphalt. I'd say it's impossible to recommend it. The tiresome and repetitive driving licenses are exactly the same as in all the other Gran Turismo-games and it feels like Polyphony refuses to accept the fact that the racing genre has evolved quite a bit since the first game in their bestselling series was released.

Spending two hours trying to hit completely hopeless break points or learn such valuable skills as "break before hitting a curve" makes me sleepy, and that doesn't make Gran Turismo PSP a particularly entertaining game. Quite the opposite. It doesn't help that these license-tests are completely pointless, since you don't actually win anything. No new cars, no fancy trophy, no unlockable game mode. Nothing.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Gran Turismo as a series. I worshipped the first game, spent hundreds of hours with the second installment and A-spec and enjoyed large parts of Gran Turismo 4, even though the rather stiff car physics and the lack of real time deformation had a negative impact on my final score. The best part of the series is the abstinence that sets in after just a few hours.

It's incredibly easy to become hooked to advancing my career, winning more competitions, getting more trophies, more money and working on my favorite cars. It's a constant hunt for more, which means that I've returned to the previous games in the series over and over again. In the version for the PSP it gets hard to keep playing in the first place. Sure, it has 802 cars and 34 tracks, but nothing drives me forward. Nothing keeps me motivated.

Out on the track Gran Turismo PSP feels more or less identical to Gran Turismo 4, the game it is based on. The car physics are the same and the controls have been faithfully adapted from the analog shoulder buttons on the Playstation 2 to the digital versions of the PSP. It works well to drive the car using either the digital cross or the small analog stick. Personally I would've preferred to use the stick, but since it's placed where it is on the PSP 3000 and my hands are as big as toilet seat covers, it's sadly impossible for me.

The physics are still way too stiff, but generally most of the cars are simulated well with a certain amount of stability control and some anti-spin, just like they usually are in Polyphonys' games. After playing around in GT Legends and Need for Speed: Shift it's hard to not yawn a bit at how the cars in Gran Turismo PSP behave, since despite their obvious qualities their behaviour still feels dated. It doesn't matter which car you are playing with or how powerful its engine is, it still feels like the cars move forward and turns in a crawl and the four wheel direct drive in cars like Mitsubishi Evo IX or Nissan GT-R (R35) is non-existent.

It's hard to ignore the fact that Gran Turismo makes me want to do some real racing in a way that few other racing games can. Ten laps on Autumn Ring in a Veyron are a lot of fun. But I was hoping for a lot more.

Instead of facing five other cars (like in Gran Turismo 4) you are competing against only three in Gran Turismo PSP. The artificial intelligence is as lacking as always and you are able to, according to Gran Turismo tradition, use the braindead opponents as walls. The easiest way to overcome other cars and advance in the competitions is to just to hit the pedal to the metal, take the inner curve and use the opponents as an outer wall so you don't slide onto the grass. That's almost as realistic as winning the DTM finals on a trimmed moped, and about as addictive game wise as spending an afternoon with Cruis'n.

Except "driver challenges" and the completely lifeless single player mode, Gran Turismo for the PSP also includes a drift mode, just like Gran Turismo HD and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue did. And just like in Prologue it's all about terribly stiff drifting, where you should be happy just managing to provoke the end of the car to start spinning and just as happy to bring it in again. The drift events are short, boring and lack any form of imagination. Since they are not ranked and there are no records to beat, the drift part of the package feels utterly pointless.

Another disappointment is multiplayer. Hooking up with four friends through the Adhoc mode lets you choose which cars to drive and what track to drive them on, then you compete about snagging first place. That's it. Forget fancy frills like the ability to tailor your own tournament, the Adhoc Party feels more like a Prologue-detail. A small taste of a future, real game.

When it comes to the graphics, Gran Turismo PSP looks good, but it is hardly one of the prettiest games for the console. The cars are detailed and the game flows in an impressive 60 frames per second, but the presentation is severely lacking and not thought through (it is for example impossible to see which cars you already own when browsing the shop, which sometimes lead to me buying a car I already owned), and the total graphical experience isn't especially jaw dropping. The sound, just like the graphics, is well made but does not offer any surprises. The music might be a bit too disco, and the ridiculously small PSP speakers make the sound of the tires screaming sound more like a small pet being beaten to death than actual tires, but at its core the sound is quite good.

I am really starting to get tired of Gran Turismo as a series and Polyphony as developers, I'm sad to say. They take five years to put together a racing game while the competition do it in less than a third of that time. When they finally launch a new game it doesn't feel complete in a way you would expect after five years in development. Instead it feels like a wafer thin appetizer, meant to create hype for that particular game that never seem to be released. That legendary Gran Turismo 5.

As a portable race game, Gran Turismo PSP looks good and contains a lot of licensed monster cars. It lacks a proper career mode in any shape or size, which means that this just feels like another Prologue. A hand held Prologue at that, which is not enough for me. So please skip the cake in the future, Polyphony.