GT4: Prologue

Sony gives European gamers a brief taste of the highly anticipated Gran Turismo 4.

The release of Gran Turismo in 1997 hailed a revolution in console games. Not content with thrashing imaginary cars around the gaudy coastal roads of Ridge Racer, now console gamers wanted real physics, real car upgrades and real Japanese supercars shaped like bricks. The influence of GT cannot be understated, with many of the game's elements appearing in other games.

In retrospect, the two sequels have not quite lived up to that first brilliant game. Gran Turismo 2 was rushed and many new features were ditched so the game could finally get onto store shelves, even then it contained a few bugs. The third game, arriving rather late and dropping its GT2000 moniker, showed what you could get out of a PlayStation 2. But the game's structure had changed little, and despite the gorgeous graphics - the series had not moved on. The biggest problem for the franchise was that it wasn't a great racing game, the AI cars showed very little I, and seemed completely unaware of the player's presence.

There's no doubt that for a realistic driving experience, at least on a console, the GT franchise has yet to be beaten. But there are new games on the horizon such as Microsoft's Forza Motorsport, the development of which is lead by a veritable who's who of driving game experience. There's no doubt at all that GT4 will sell in the millions, but volume sales are not what we base reviews on here, what we're interested in is how good a game is.

And so we come to Gran Turismo 4: Prologue, a taster for the full GT4 coming later this year or perhaps early next year. Let's get the idea of a rip=off out of the way first. For £25 (cheaper if you shop around) you get fifty cars and five tracks, two game modes and the usual lovely replay facilities. If you feel £25 is a fair swap for that, and one must remember the original Ridge Racer at £50 for one track, then fair play to you my friend.

The centre of GT Prologue is the driving school and it really is an odd way of introducing the latest GT game to the masses. There can be for PS2 owners who haven't played another game in the Gran Turismo franchise, in fact one wonders why someone would own a PS2 and not GT3. With that in mind, the driving school starts at an appallingly basic level. Many of the initial tests are mind bafflingly simple, as though aimed at someone who has never played a videogame before, let alone a racing game.

GT Prologue is clearly aimed at a hardcore audience that doesn't have the patience to wait for the full GT4 game. Yet tests that require the player to drive in a straight line, go round a corner slowly, etc. seem ridiculously basic given the average level of skills among driving game fans. The tests do get much tougher later on, but really Sony should have developed a training program that was based on assuming players had actually used a joypad before - rather than this oddly tame remedial start.

It doesn't help matters that most of the cars earned in the early stages are identical underpowered boxy superminis. Many of GT's rivals have cottoned on to the fact you don't really need to offer the bottom end of the car market to gamers and instead concentrate on the more desirable cars. GT is sticking to the idea of covering all basis so there's a long period of driving superminis slowly around corners before anything with a decent velocity arrives in the player's lap. For GT veterans it's like graduating from university and then being told they have to learn to read all over again.