Gran Turismo Concept

Gran Turismo Concept: 2002 Tokyo-Geneva to be exact. If Gran Turismo 3 was on PC, this would be its expansion pack. Basically, GT Concept was designed to be a watered down, arcade experience for GT fans to fill in the time whilst Gran Turismo 4 was secretly starting to be designed. The main sort of theme as the name suggests is that its filled with concept cars, as well as several new vehicles that were being released at the time.

There were 10 tracks in total, 5 of which were just the first batch in reverse. The 3 road courses were Midfield Raceway, Tokyo R246 and a newly revamped Autumn Ring, all of which had reversed versions. The two rally courses consisted of Swiss Alps and Tahiti Maze, again, also available in reverse form. Before you can race on these however you must complete the license test for each track. The "license tests" are really just time trials with 3 target times to beat (gold, silver and bronze, as you might expect). Interestingly, you can select to have a pace car lead the way to help you learn the course, and the pace car in question is the same one from GT4.

Upon beating these time trials, you unlock the track you completed as well as a car, no questions asked. Complete it on gold, you win a car to go towards the "Dream Cars" category; a selection of concept cars or then-newly released models made into racing variants, specifically Le Mans specifications (Nissan GT-R Concept LM, Ford GT40 Concept LM, Honda NSX-R LM etc.) as well as few others, such as the Toyota RSC rally car. If you've played GT4 and GT5, these cars should be familiar to you, and this is the reason they are mostly from 2001 and 2002.

Other than the concept cars, the other cars were, as mentioned earlier, new models which were being released at the time. Cars such as the Jaguar S-Type R, Lupo GTi, the 7.3 litre Zonda, Mk. I Focus RS and the Evo VIII GT-A just to name a few. Hyundai made their first appearance in the series as well. Some of the cars are reruns from GT3 though, like the Corvette C6 and the RUF RGT.

Other than that, the game physics are identical to GT3's, except in an attempt to make the game more arcade style, the steering was... loosened, shall we say. All the cars have severe amounts of oversteer, with the exception of FWD cars, which have too much [I]understeer[/I] instead.

All in all, GT Concept is quite good, if not a little short. For car fans, it is quite interesting to production cars in their concept car guises, like the Daihatsu Copen, Nissan Micra (then called the mm), Ford GT and the Chrysler Crossfire. Getting gold on all the licenses is a challenge, and has that extra sensation of knowing you get a new car when you succeed (although prepared to be a little bit disappointed when you win something like the Mazda 6 LM or the Nissan mm-R race car). However, don't bother looking for this game if your in the NTSC regions as it wasn't released there.

Dude.
Why not play GT5? It's got all the cars of GT Concept, including both concepts and production versions, better graphics, much better physics. I find it hard to play older GTs after 5, the cars in 5 really felt great. Makes GT3 and 4 feel sort of stale.

Actually, there was an NTSC version in English and Chinese release in SE Asia.