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Game Critiques

Championship Manager
Gran Tourismo 3
Earth and Beyond

Gran Tourismo 3

Although I've dedicated more game hours to GT3 than any other PS2 game I own, there are some small areas that I'd like to see improved.

Game Balance

Although part of the premise of GT3 is getting bigger and better cars with which to trounce the opposition, I personally still like to try and keep the challenge up.  Since many of GT3's races have very loose entry restrictions, actually choosing a car which will be competitive, but not over the top, is very difficult - especially when they don't tell you which cars will be in the race before you enter.

I would like a little more info before a race starts.  I have no desire to be zooming around in a Polyphony F1 car when my opponents are driving Honda NSX's, as there is virtually no skill required to win.  If I could get more idea as to the relative power/ handling of the cars, then I could pick a suitable one with which to race.

Providing extra information wouldn't prevent you choosing a superior car if you really wanted to, but would allow you to handicap yourself to the correct degree to make the race as difficult or easy as you like.

For these reasons, my favourite races tend to be the manufacturer ones, where there are very limited choices as to the cars, and most of the competitors are very similar in performance.  Sadly, these are also the races that are the furthest away from the "loads of cars to choose and race" ethos that makes the GT franchise so fantastic.

GT2 used to have horsepower limiters on the races, but for some reason they took these out of the third installation (although power to weight ratios might be more useful in determining actual speed).

Race Entry

The race entry screen shows you information as to how much money you get for finishing the race, what cars can enter etc etc.  This also lets you know whether the car you are currently in is legally allowed to enter the race.  Cars can be illegal for a number of different reasons; drive type, aspiration, model, tuned etc.  Some of these disqualify a car totally (you can't enter a front wheel drive, front engined car in a front engine, rear real drive race), but some just mean you need to make changes to the current car. 

 However, if your car is illegal for whatever reason, you cannot simply choose a new car from your garage here, you have to go all the way back to your garage (6 menu screens away), and then return.  In some cases, the reason for a particular car being illegal is not immediately obvious.  For example, in one case, you are not allowed "tuned" cars, but there is no easy way to see which of your cars are illegal - race cars, and ones you have tuned yourself are illegal, but some cars are counted as tuned when you win them, or buy them even though you have done nothing to them.  If you could select a car from your garage through this screen, with cars marked as being allowed or not allowed, it would greatly simplify this process.  This can also be the case when you have a number of similar models (for example, Nissan Skylines), and only a few of these are allowed in a particular race.

If a car is not allowed in a race because (for example) you have fitted it with a turbocharger, then you also can't change that here.  In actual fact, to do this, you have to enter ANOTHER race to get to the car setup screen, and then quit out of that race and return to the desired one.

GT Mode Main Screen User Interface

I don't know who decided how the icons should be arranged around the main screen, but unfortunately in my mind they've made a mistake.  I always believe that an interface on such a screen should be consistent, but unfortunately this is not the case.  In some cases, it can be unclear as to which direction to press to get to the desired location, which should be easy to avoid.  However, in some situations the series of commands necessary to go from A to B, and to go back from B to A are not compatible.  For example, to go from My Home to Tune Shop, you can press Right.  However, if you press Left from Tune Shop (the logical return button) you end up at the Show Rooms, and you then have to press Down to return to My Home.

General User Interface

For such a big title, I am surprised as to how poor the general user interface for the game is.  This isn't how it looks, but how the whole game functions together.  In many cases it is just overly convoluted.

Oil Changes

This one just confuses me.  Firstly, I just don't really see the point - it's just a stupid level of micromanagement that seems completely unnecessary, and differs completely from the level of care needed in other parts of the car.  More importantly, you can only do this at the garage, and therefore can't do it in the middle of a race series.  Since some of these series are very long, you can start with completely fresh oil, and towards the end of the series, your oil warning light is lit.  Of course, you can't actually change oil between races.  You can change turbochargers, downforce settings, gear ratios etc etc.  If I have to worry about changing the oil, I'd really rather it was integrated more gracefully.

Cars too tunable/ not balanced with cost

This may well be a very contentious one, but I feel that certain cars are too tunable with too few negatives for their cost.  Some cars can be tuned to give a great deal more horsepower, but are very difficult to drive, whilst others are incredible.  A relatively cheap Nissan Skyline can be turned into a 1,000hp monster, which still handles better than most non race cars you can get.  This isn't true in all cases.  Both the Nissan 300ZX, and Dodge Viper can be tuned to around 1,000hp, but handle badly, so the advantage isn't so great.

This has several impacts.

Effectively, this tuning makes most of the cars in the game not worth using - why use an Aston Martin Vanquish when a much cheaper, much more easily acquired car will blow it off the road?  Most real life supercars have an enormous amount of power compared to standard road cars, but even a lot of the "bad" cars in GT3 can pump out over 400hp, matching most (and beating a lot) of the best production cars in the world.

Very quickly in the game you can get a car that can handle most of the races short of the professional courses (most of which need "race" tuned cars).  I think it would be better if the improvement was a little more gradual.

It diminuishes the value of "dream" cars.  When your Skyline can make a Jaguar XJ220 roll over and beg for mercy, you lose a lot of the excitement that obtaining such a car should give.  The game is about these dream cars, and yet most of them aren't even worth getting into.  To give a couple of examples, I've tuned a Honda Integra R and Mercedes 230 Compressor so they are quicker than an Aston Martin Vanquish, AC Cobra, Honda NSX, Dodge Viper and others.  Going from a Honda Integra to an Aston Martin should be exciting, but it's not.  I'm not saying that the Vanquish should be awesomely quick to drive - in real life around a course it would be beaten by cars with less power, but you should at least realise that this thing IS poweful.  As it is, it feels pedestrian.

I'm not saying that the more expensive cars should be better in all respects, but tuning should carry more of a penalty than it currently does, making the more expensive cars more viable.

Computer Car Pit Stops

In the longer races, the player and computer controlled cars have to make pit stops.  Whilst I enjoy the added option - you can try and nurse your tyres to make fewer pitstops or alter your strategy with softer or harder tyres, the computer controlled cars make ridiculous decisions in terms of when they make pitstops.

For example, in a 15 lap race, you can find computer cars making pitstops on lap 14.