GT4 - The best car racing sim anywhere.

Seriously. This is the best Car racing game available on any system.
Let's get that out of the way at the start. Anyone who says otherwise either hasn’t played it or they don’t know how to drive a car.

Now, let’s list the challengers and cross them off one by one. We’ve got Xbox’s first desperate attempt to match GT4 which was called Project Gotham Racing. Now this game is okay, meaning it's probably almost as good as GT1. Compared to GT3 it’s probably 20% there, compared to GT4, let’s not even go there. And what is with the name!?! How can you take a game with a name that sounds like something out of a B-grade Batman movie and try to pass it off as a serious racing simulator.

Gotham 2 was released later on and was probably a mild improvement over it’s predecessor but still not anywhere close to being in the league of GT3 or GT4. It may have slightly pipped GT1. One other thing which deserves a mention is the "Kudos" that you earn for doing things in the Gotham games. I’m not saying that it’s not a good idea but it’s hardly related to a simulation. If this game is supposed to be a better simulation than GT3 or GT4, as the Xbox fans seem to continuously preach, what the hell is an arcade game feature such as Kudos doing in the game.

Anyway, let’s move onto the latest Xbox offering that the Xbox monkeys are hyping as a game that "shit’s all over GT4". A friend of mine actually emphatically made that proclaimation when I dared suggest that GT4 is untouchable in terms of realism. The game I’m talking about is Forza Motorsport and I’ll excuse you if you find yourself saying "I can’t say of heard of that one" to yourself. See like most of the games that supposedly rival GT4, when you try to remember the name of those games 6 months after their release date, you struggle. Forza has it’s good points and in essence it’s a good game but to be honest it still doesn’t come close to GT4. It is a lot closer to the mark than Gotham ever was and it definitely has more of a simulation type feel to it but the physics still aren’t quite there. The car models are also not quite as crisp and sharp as the GT4 (or GT3 for that matter) models.

The big plus for Forza that any Xbox dweeb will rattle on about endlessly is the fact that it has damage. Fair enough, I can pay that. It has damage and GT4 doesn’t but in all honesty it’s only there for the sake of it. You can pretty much plough your car head on into a barrier and only suffer minor damage, so what is the point. Sure, you’re car may look slightly damaged in the replay but hardly a realistic example of what it would really look like after ploughing into a wall. So for mine, it’s a pointless addition to the game. You see, if GT4 had have implemented this kind of addition to the game, chances are it would have been dumped prior to the game getting shipped because it wasn’t 100% on the mark. Every GT game has been renowned for being extremely polished in every facet of the game. It’s the exact reason that the online play was scrapped in GT4, because the design team weren’t happy with it and didn’t want to include it just for the sake of having it. But let’s get back on track, in summary Forza is a good game with reasonably realistic car physics and gameplay. It’s a game that I’d recommend to Xbox owners as the closest thing to GT4 available on the Xbox. One more side note, Forza has about 250 different cars, GT4 has over 700 different cars. When I recently mentioned this to a Xbox obsessed friend he responded with "So, most of the cars are crap and not worth driving anyway". I should point out that he hasn’t actually played GT4, he’s basing his whole opinion on what he read in an Xbox magazine which is specifically written to con Xbox owners into believing that Xbox is actually a better option than the Playstation2.

Anyway, I’d just like to point out that the point of writing this is not to prove that GT4 is the best racing sim available, I believe if people look at the facts they’d already be pretty aware of that. The real point of this is to point out the fucking blatant obvious in a way that the Xbox spanner heads might be able to understand.

By the way, I own an Xbox and Playstation 2 and I also own copies of all of the games I've mentioned in this blog. Yes, I've played them all and have an unbiased opinion on the matter.
If any of you mullet head Xbox fans want to abuse me. I look forward to the amusing attempts to convince yourselves that you have any game available that is capable of matching GT4 in any way.

Out.