A couple of years ago I picked up Gran Turismo 3 for the Playstation 2. It was cheap and supposed to be quite good. Tonight I finally got around to playing it.

Before I get into it here is a little background. I have been playing racing games since Pole Position. I happen to be pretty decent at them. My technique isn't the best. I suck at the license tests. But I usually manage to win. Sure my car would be a junked piece of trash at the end of the race but I crossed the finish line first.

The first racing game I bought was probably Sega Rally on the Saturn. Unfortunately I sucked at every track other than the desert track. This was due to the game being programmed such that tapping the edge of the track resulted in a complete loss of momentum. As I just mentioned my technique isn't that wonderful. That meant I touched the railing quite a bit. Hence my amazing ability to set records every time on the desert track but never manage to beat the other three tracks.

Awhile after that I picked up the first Gran Turismo on the Playstation. It was a pretty amazing game in terms of looks and playability. However, it introduced a hellish new feature to racing games. The dreaded license tests. In order to unlock the majority of the game you had to earn your license by jumping through a bunch of stupid hoops. I literally spent approximately twenty-four hours over the course of a month or so beating the B class license, the easiest one. As soon as I earned the license I played the tracks I had unlocked. I beat each of them on the first try, except one that took me a couple of tries. So I spent twenty-four hours to earn forty-five minutes of fun. I then spent eight or so hours trying to earn an A class license, failing miserably. At that point I permanently consigned the game to the shelf. I believe I may still own it but I haven't put it in the machine since then.

I played a number of other games that entertained me more after that such as Manx TT Superbike, Sega Touring Car, and my personal favorite, Sega GT on the Dreamcast. It had the same style of racing as Gran Turismo but without the irritating licenses. All I had to do to keep racing was win races. I never came close to finishing it but was always satisfied when I put it in. It also had the added bonus of analog gas and brakes via the left and right triggers. Drifting and powersliding are far easier when you have a decent analog response and can be tapping the brakes while giving it the gas at the same time. This was a feature not possible on the Playstation due to its dual stick design that lacked the analog buttons.

Eventually I picked up an XBox, and Sega GT was one of the first games I bought for it. I expected more of the same greatness that the Dreamcast version had. Unfortunately it was more of a simulation game where you had to worry about maintaining your car's parts. That isn't exactly fun in my book. If I wanted to be a mechanic I would be a mechanic. The reason I buy racing games is to do things I'm not stupid enough or too cheap to do in real life. The XBox Sega GT also took a page from Gran Turismo and added license tests. These two things helped to make this game the most disappointing racing title I have ever played. I should just throw the game away because I definitely don't enjoy playing it.

Which brings me to Gran Turismo 3. Amazingly enough GT3 actually allows you to play a decent selection of tracks and cars without earning a license. I actually have no idea if there even are licenses in the game. I just played it in arcade mode. At first the game seemed pretty good. Cars seem to have decent physics, the graphics look good, and the soundtrack is excellent with cuts from bands I actually like, such as Motley Crue and AC/DC.

However, around about the second track I started to notice some amazingly irritating things. The game is just broken. Like say I powerslide a turn and miss it. Ordinarily I would spin out and be stopped facing the opposite direction with the car idled (or stalled if it was real life.) Not in Gran Turismo 3 though. The car spins out alright but the engine stays revved and the game still thinks I'm at 7K rpm in 3rd gear while I am not spinning the tires and not moving. Let's just say that this is utterly broken. It really makes it a challenge to recover from a mishap when your vehicle acts in such a screwed up manner.

Another bug I ran into is that it gets screwed up while accelerating and shifting on occasion. I rev it up slowly in first gear and shift to second after an accident. The car almost stalls out like I powershifted it straight to fourth or fifth rather than second. It wasn't spinning the tires in first and was going like thirty mph. It is still going thirty in second but takes about thirty seconds to rev up to where I can shift into third. The game is just crap. I have played such no name titles as Tokyo Battle Highway that were less broken than this.

One thing that isn't really a bug but seriously bothers me about this game is that it is on the Playstation 2. The analog face buttons are utterly worthless. For a decent analog feel for gas and brakes you at least need triggers. Microsoft and Nintendo managed to learn this lesson from Sega. Too bad Sony didn't. As real as the Gran Turismo serier purports itself to be, it totally falls down with the sucky Playstation controllers.

Yet another irritating feature that Gran Turismo 3 has in common with many other racing games is replays. You have to through about four menus after finishing a race. At two different points it tries to play the replay or prompt you to play the replay. I do not understand why anyone would ever want to watch their replay after every race. The race is done. You won or you lost. It isn't as though this is Burnout 2 where you caused a spectacular multi-million dollar crash during the race. Replays should be an option you have to turn on rather than being on by default with no way to turn them totally off. Additionally there should be one menu at most after the race is finished. It should show the win/loss order, prompt you to put in your name if you set a record, then kick you to the menu to do another race, replay, redo the same race, or exit. That is it. It is obvious that no one ever though about usability in this game.

Oh, and there is no way to skip the intro to each race. You are forced to watch these odd camera cuts of your car at each tick before the race starts. It is most disconcerting and totally gets rid of the immersion feel. Along with this is the inability to restart a race you screwed up. When a person hits start during a race they should have 4 options; Continue, Restart race, Options, and Exit. You shouldn't just have Continue and Exit as your options like Gran Turismo 3 does.

Just to make sure I never put this piece of junk in my Playstation 2 again I threw one of my throwing knives through the game and chucked it in the trash. I will put a picture of that online in the near future as a visual aid to this review. Until I played this I was seriously thinking about getting Gran Turismo 4 and the new fancy steering wheel/pedal set that is coming out for it. I think I will pass on it now. I would rather spend a few hundred dollars on a spare set of tires for my Grand Am and take it out drifting than spend it on another Gran Turismo game.