Original Release: Sony, 2001, PlayStation 2
The first Gran Turismo release for the PS2 stepped up the presentation as expected, but also improved the player experience a bit while reducing the overall car count. The gratuitous “A-Spec” subtitle is the base game, not a special version.
Gran Turismo 3 (PS2, Sony, 2001)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Though I appreciated many of the qualities of the initial PS1 entries, and had some fun with some of the races and aspects, I left that console era with the feeling that “The Real Driving Simulator” wasn’t quite for me. It was mostly due to the constant feeling of having a little Japanese man behind you whacking you with a stick and yelling “NO THAT WRONG!!!” at every little deviation from “proper” racing technique, yet not providing you nearly enough in-game instruction as to exactly how that technique is supposed to work.
Gran Turismo 3, the entry that jumped to the PS2, still has some of that. But for me it was markedly more enjoyable and where things started to “click,” thanks to a fair amount of loosening of the “training gates” locking off the game’s content.
You do still have to pass the obnoxious license tests to access the majority of the Simulation Mode’s content. However, there is one important change: that doesn’t carry over to the Arcade Mode, it’s now wide open with nearly all of the game’s tracks and a broad selection of good cars right from the beginning. Not only can completing race sets in this mode furnish you with good cars to give you a boost in Simulation Mode, it also provides a more fun and free way to sort of teach yourself the finer points of the game. It certainly helped me a lot; I couldn’t even finish the bronze B licenses in the PS1 entries, but after a few hours futzing around in Arcade Mode here just having fun and picking things up on my own I pretty much breezed through all those trials (save a couple that took a few retries as I was falling like less than a second short of the required time).
Gran Turismo’s challenge really just boils down to two things: handling sharp corners with “proper” and realistic technique, and buying and tuning cars such that they out-muscle the competition on straightaways. That first component is by far the toughest part of the equation. If you don’t come in supplying your own race car driver knowledge, you aren’t getting it from the game, you’re just going to have to trial-and-error other than some occasional vague mumbled advice in a track description and a vague blue line overlay on the track that actually often isn’t the most helpful approach. I still wouldn’t call GT3 anything close to “arcadey,” but it does seem a little easier and less demanding on the handling than its predecessors. I can’t really come up with a concrete explanation for this but I think it may just be the generally improved physics in jumping to the PS2 hardware, combined with a controller that has a little more sensitivity to input.
The game’s one “arcadey” conceit is retained, and it continues to help in some races … your car is essentially invincible and free to ram other cars with impunity. That can be played to some strategic advantage, especially when using other cars as momentum sinks to carom off of while working your way up the pack and taking sharp corners. It’s less helpful when trying to maintain a lead, but on some tracks you can take advantage of the other cars driving “realistically” and attempting to avoid collisions by doing something they would never do like plowing across a patch of grass or two with enough speed to make a shortcut out of it.
Other than still having something of a demanding learning curve, complaints are minimal. The biggest one for series fans will probably be the drop in car count despite the move to DVD; GT3 has just 180 cars, only about 40 more than the original game and almost 500 fewer than its prequel! I don’t see much of a good explanation for this, other than maybe Sony trying to get it out close to the PS2 launch (it still ended up coming out a little over a year later). But it was an anomaly for the series, which would climb back up to 700+ cars with GT4 and then into the thousands with the following games. The other thing I didn’t care for was the soundtrack, which continues the theme of trying to license hot n’ popular tracks of the time. These things are always a product of their times and the early 00s was not a great time for pop music … you’ve got some Matrix kungfu techno, a cheesy promotional rap from Snoop Dogg, MOD SKILLZ, Lenny Kravitz stuff that’s beyond played at this point, Powerman 5000, Raekwon, a HUGE dose of Feeder for some reason … about the only thing I enjoyed was 80s classic “She Sells Sanctuary” tbh. The Japanese release continued with supplying its own original instrumental rock that’s pretty good, I think a few tracks made it into this version but with the DVD storage it would have been nice if you could switch to that as an option.
If you’re looking for an early entry point for the series, I think this is the place to start. Arcade Mode gives you a ton of stuff to do upon bootup with no gating, it looks nicer, it’s a little easier to come to grips with, about the only downgrade is the car count and soundtrack. It could stand to do a little more in teaching you what it expects given how it demands perfect execution in some aspects, but it also gives you much more room than the prior games to play around and figure it out for yourself in your own way. Also surprisingly still dirt cheap on Amazon and such, it looks like GT4 draws a lot more attention of the two PS2 entries.
Links
Basic ROM (ISO) editor for license test time settings, track data, CPU opponent stats, car prices and more
Concept Mod – Adds cars and courses from Gran Turismo: Concept
Videos