Sadly, the PC’s finest racing game was also its least accessible. Where Gran Turismo and Forza were welcoming, easing you in with slower cars, easy championships and generous driving aids, GTR sent the message “get good or get out”. For every motorsports fan that found in GTR the answer to his or her prayers, several others found it just too much like hard work. Playing GTR and winning took real nerve, real concentration and days of mastering driving technique.Īnd this – its biggest strength – was ironically its biggest weakness. Playing Gran Turismo was tough, but you could scrape by after a couple of hours. GTR Racing felt scarily real, its handling so fiercely demanding that it made you understand the gulf between racing a supercar on a TV screen and trying to keep the beast on-track in real life. No matter how much Kazunori Yamauchi spouted on about the realism of Gran Turismo 4, nothing on a console could hope to match Simbin’s real-world physics masterclass running on a high-end Athlon 64. Suddenly, the PC didn’t just have a decent serious racing sim, it had arguably the most sophisticated on the planet.
He had good reason to be so sad.įIA GTR Racing changed that overnight. Pity the poor bloke in the corner of the pub mumbling about how Need for Speed was better before EA spoiled everything. Despite a handful of decent driving games, the PC had nothing that could really stand up to the likes of the PlayStation 2’s Gran Turismo or the Xbox’s Forza Motorsport, so if you were a fan of serious racing sims, you either made the best of TOCA Race Driver 2, or sat in a corner waffling on about the golden days of Grand Prix Legends. Up until last year, PC racers might have felt like they were having sand kicked in their faces by their console-owning cousins.
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