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| The Duel: Test Drive II, 1989 |
After I finished the Le Mans 24 Hours in May I considered
Gran Turismo 5 done and dusted. When I picked it back up in
November last year I started messing around in arcade mode trying out different handicaps. Traction control and anti-lock braking are driving aids and are supposed to be disabled eventually like training wheels, but the majority of players seem to race with them enabled - disabling them, especially online, effectively make them handicaps. This wasn't enough to perpetuate the novelty and once I received the
G27 racing wheel I had to learn how to use a clutch and H-pattern gearbox. I mastered that quickly and moved onto heel-toe shifting which, again in time, I mastered. I ditched racing tyres for slippery sports tyres when driving street cars and adjusted to that. Everything can be adapted to. You could argue the Ferrari F40 in all its jolting twitchy instability is a car that could be tamed in a way. While you can certainly learn the F40's behaviour and catch the back drifting out before spinning, it can never become a boring car. It can be frustrating. I quit the Nürburgring 4 Hours last year because it was just too demanding to constantly reign it in on the Nordschleife while trying to create a lead over the second place runner. You have to be hyper-vigilant on a roller-coaster track that sends it in any combination of directions and that's why making it through a lap is rewarding. It's a shame the F40's rival, the Porsche 959, is contractually absent along with the rest of the Porsche stable. It's also a shame the 911 GT1 isn't able to go up against the CLK-GTR, but then they never made a classic game about those two. The Nordschleife, too, is just another sequence of turns you can memorise given enough practice. Hence I've been delving into the Course Maker
again to produce another four circuits. I still vacillate between desiring high-speed straight and narrow tracks and twisty rural roads of the variety that might have been seen in
Test Drive II. I realise describing corners can be repetitive given the limited vocabulary which is why I've been thinking about buying a video capture device so I can upload the best lap replays to YouTube. It certainly would help interested downloaders to see them in action, or rather to see them as the scene of the action.
