Road to Nowhere

Nürburgring map, Public Domain, 1964

Way back when Gran Turismo 2 divided its main screen into North, South, East, and West cities I imagined a future instalment of the series in which you drove to each dealership and the home and garage were actual places and not just menus. When Test Drive Unlimited turned up it should have been my dream made real, but the arcade style of racing doesn't appeal to me especially when it assumes the cloak of realism with licensed vehicles. The fact I was playing the crappy PS2 port at the time didn't help. With the RPG elements present in GT5 it seems like the premier PlayStation racing game missed the boat there, which cannot be true since Polyphony Digital never gets anything wrong. Cue statement contradicting this.

Possibly more annoying than failed shifts stranding you in neutral is GT5's course maker. As with the FIFA series and Subbuteo, some lay the virtual demise of Scalectrix at the likes of the Formula One series and GT. One of the great things about Scalectrix was the freedom to create whatever track layout you wanted - limited by space and budget, of course. I had always wanted to create a bridge span across the stairs of my old bedroom but couldn't given the amount of pocket money I'd have to blow on extra track pieces (the exact same reason I couldn't expand my Lego train set). So you'd think GT5, free of such limitations, could provide an actual course maker and not a random corner generator.

Everyone has their favourite tracks and others they hate. Spa-Francorchamps has always been liked by F1 drivers whereas I recall the preceding Hungaroring being the August nadir of the championship calendar. Since the introduction of the Nürburgring Nordschleife in GT4, said track has been something of an abusive partner. In reality it became a death trap that was too challenging for its own good, yet with the prospect removed of being burnt alive for your mistakes or mechanical failures the magnificence becomes apparent. Sometimes, though, you just wish you could tame it and make it shorter. Or replace that bit after one of your favourite corners with something better. Unfortunately with the 'course maker', you get what you're given. The first course I made used the Eifel circuit template, since that was intended as a Nürburg clone. The pit straight led to a 200 mph wide sweeping uphill right hand turn that crested and fell away into a right-left S-bend before levelling off for a narrower slow corner. Along with a coincidental half-Corkscrew from Laguna Seca; it was a great start, I thought, but I'm stuck with the rest of the course which is a poorly flowing rip off of the technical section from the Ring. I've wasted many hours trying to recreate terrifying / exhilarating runs like Fuchsröhre and Pflanzgarten.

The rough rule of the course maker is that more split sections make for a longer track - the maximum being seven. The program throws up a topology and places your track on it. The extent of customisation is being able to change the complexity of the sections (1-10, creating more corners), the width of the section of track, the sharpness of the generated corners, and the camber of the corners. Given enough tinkering you can happen across a great corner, but the punch in the face is that modifying a section almost always affects the other sections. Any radical changes are guaranteed to wipe out the section you wish to keep, and there's no way of marking it as unalterable - the program forces the rest of the track to fit. The one success I've had was creating a high speed oval shaped like a kidney bean - thus named 'Nierebohnering' - and that's because all sections were set to zero complexity turning it into one big corner. It's not flat, though. The Eifel template has a lot of elevation changes, one of which aligns with the track in such a way as to create a crest that can only be taken flat out in a Le Mans Prototype on exactly the right line or with maximum downforce. For the idiot AI, nothing less than one of the Ferrari F1 cars prevents every single one of them sliding into the barrier. For some reason this is the only part they attempt to take at full throttle whilst they brake slightly before gentle curves.

Aside from the Mount Aso template, which is almost exclusively used to create massive jumps for brief entertainment, the only other that sees much use is the Toscana circuit. Toscana has two things going for it: it's a road course not unlike something from Test Drive II (my first racing game), and it has a day-night transition. A recurrent flaw is the insistence of the program in creating blind corners, which can be corrected with adding camber, but most rural roads don't look like the old banked sections of Monza. Continuing with my desire to create the kind of tracks that were ultimately altered by the FIA, I stumbled onto a nice triangular circuit with a long 200 mph slightly curved back straight. Of course, there's always something that blights it - the pit straight falls away into a blind sharp right turn. I named it 'Targa Toscana' even though it's nowhere near as long or suicidal as the Targa Florio, however in my fantasies Jackie Stewart boycotts it and the FIA strikes it from the calendar in 1976.

Beyond offering an achievement for even looking at the course maker, and sharing tracks with friends; Gran Turismo 5 only really seems to make use of the templates to generate random courses in the Seasonal Events (just so you can't rely on having memorised the courses). Another boat missed - let Polyphony Digital never make a boat racing sim. That said, it's far more a calculated move than a mistake on their part as providing the tools to re-create real-world tracks would undercut future Downloadable Content sales which is the industry's cash cow these days.

Seeing as I just reached Level 40, my final challenge is winning the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Not to worry though, this isn't the last I'll waffle on about Gran Turismo. Just the last for this year.

[1042 ; 1.45]