Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

The Gran Turismo franchise began with an amazing game with never-seen before graphics, solid and highly detailed car models from manufacturers all around the world, how the shadows of trees affect your car's looks as you fly by Trail Mountain Circuit, 3D graphics, and beautiful(ish) scenery; a masterpiece of digital art. The "Gran Turismo mode" had a huge amount of races to complete, 100's of cars to collect, including big names like Aston Martin, Subaru, Nissan, Chevrolet and many more. But what really blew everyone away was the beautiful graphics, in which the poor PS1 was sweating like a pig to pull off.

Car handling was realistic, but certain car's acceleration characterisics were, let's say...heavy, slow, and sloppy. Eg. Licence test No.1 Acceleration, and braking. You're supposed to do a 100 meter dash in a Japanese shopping trolley, aka, the Mazda Demio. Take-off was so slow on that particular car you could make cups of coffee for two before it got to 40Kmh(or around 25Mph).Understandable for 1st time Gran Turismoers who haven't tooled around in the immense arcade mode. Give a beginner a JGTC car for their 1st test and they'll floor it, forget that they have a steering wheel and some brakes and smash through the cones and fail the licence test. Ho-Hum. Gran Turismo mode is a REALLY REALLY in-depth, uh...Career mode'ish' sort of thing to sum it up.

There's no other game like this (apart from the sequels) that shows such an amazing dedication to car realism, physics and artisticness (is that a word??).In my opinion, Gran Turismo is the Real Driving Simulator.

Realism:
Physics 8.9/10
Visual 9.2/10
Sound 7.6/10 (God, that music is repetitive!)
Level exploration N.A

Interactiveness:
Racing 9.7/10
Menus 7.8 10
Car selection 9.0/10
Car modification 7.6/10

Overall 9.0/10