Review by: Jason McMaster

Gran Turismo games are designed with one type of player in mind – the car enthusiast. When I hear the name I think of several friends who spend hours talking about and performing tuning on cars (virtual and otherwise) to get that last bit of horsepower needed to win the race. These are the type of people that, when Gran Turismo came out, worshipped at its alter and would have died for a version they could carry in their pockets. I’m sorry to say that they’ll be sorely disappointed in Gran Turismo for the PSP.

There’s no real career mode and upgrading your car is not an option. You can also do a bunch of license challenges that don’t really get you anything except a bit of money and a sense of despair knowing you spent all that time doing the WORST part of Gran Turismo for no real gain. Yeah, you can probably stop reading here, but I’ll go into a bit more detail since I’m paid by the word.

There are two modes in Gran Turismo, and neither are terribly interesting. Single Player is a quick race with your car against three other vehicles. Otherwise you can drift, like in Prologue, and run time trials. That’s it. You win a bit of cash for each race, assuming you do well, and then you pick another. There are no tournaments or any real reason to do this other than earning money. Well, earning money and because it’s not playing the Driving Challenges.

Driving Challenges, as I mentioned earlier, are the license tests from the other GT games without any benefit outside of monetary gain. This is basically the same thing as Rockstar making a standalone GTA that uses only the RC plane missions from San Andreas. Hell, maybe they could patch in a function that makes one of the other PSP buttons trigger a Rube Goldberg device that kicks me in the groin.

You may be asking yourself, “At least it has a lot of cars and tracks, I could collect the cars!” Sure, you could do that, but it’s not going to be easy thanks to a baffling design decision. Each time you race, a day advances in the game. Each day you can only visit four dealerships. Not too bad, huh? Well, you don’t get to choose which four and you don’t really know what dealerships are coming up on any given day. I guess that makes sense… if you’re role playing as someone who’s been hit on the head with a wrench every morning and forgotten what they plan to purchase so they just pull random names out of a hat. Really though, it doesn’t matter because you can’t actually upgrade your car.

Wait, that’s not right, is it? Isn’t this a GT game? You can make slight changes to your car’s tuning at race time, but you can’t actually upgrade or make changes to your vehicles. Of all the omissions in this version of GT, car upgrades puzzle me the most.