Gran Turismo PSP

As per request from the GT:HD thread, here's a thread dedicated to the PSP version of Gran Turismo.

Release date: 1 October 2009
Tracks: 35
Cars: 800+ from 90+ manufacturors

Modes:
- Challenges / Licences (102)
- Time Trial
- Race
- Drift
- Ad Hoc (race with various balancing and 'lottery' options, trade cars, give cars)

 

My friend who is also a big GT fan, whom I'll be playing with ad-hoc on Friday, got the game in the store over lunch, says it looks great and plays just like it's bigger brother on PS2. Hope to be able to test the game myself tonight.

 

It's apparently up in the PSN store ... !

Hmm, though not in Europe I think.

 

I just got the game. There's an 'export garage' option. This should update your GT5 garage with the cars in your PSP garage. Of course we won't know for sure until GT5 is out, but that's the theory anyway. I'm definitely hoping to unlock a tonne of cars by the time GT5 comes out.

I like how even the starting car is random. I just got a 1-series BMW, where others online got a Peugeot 206, and an Alfa 147. I had Lancia, RUF, Infinity and Mitsubishi as dealerships. I think I'm lucky with that, as I could buy a RUF 3400S, which is a tuned Porsche Boxter iirc and a car I really enjoyed driving in GT4, especially on the Nurburging. So I can do that already right now.

The default button configuration does not really favor people who do the shifting themselves, I feel. I changed it considerably (using the L and R for shifting, down for rear view, up for ghost on/off). Steering with the analog nub seems workable, even with no assists and professional mode.

The brightness of the screen though does not seem to be optimised for the 1k series. It's ok, but for my taste it could definitely be a little bit brighter. There's no option to change this in the game - there's only a profile for PSP screen or external display (which in itself is good of course). It's again more tempting now for me to get a PSP Go.

 

So I had my first ad-hoc experience today. Since we had our little kids with us and they couldn't be left alone much, we didn't get a chance to do much, but just enough. Here are my initial experiences:

Sharing cars
Great feature. One selects give mode and sets up a 'room' (interesting that they use it like this, eh?) in a specified slot (e.g. 1). The other selects receive mode, and waits until the room becomes visibly occupied and open for business (garage door half-rolled up). Then you go in, and you get the option to receive the cars, and then give yours as well. Unless it's a total coincidence that we had the exact same number of shareable cars, it may well be possible that you can only receive as many cars as you can potentially give back - but again, that might be a coincidence. In our case, we got to give each other 14 cars.

Racing
We did two races, and both had jackpots (2x and 3x). Once also there was a jackpot for a particular player but that player didn't win so I don't know what additional effect that might have had. This is a great way to get money quick though - after two 2-lap races (Apricot Hill and Midfield) I had something like 263.000 credits. So with two PSPs, this is definitely a quick way to make a tonne of money, and racing here doesn't change the day either so if you have two PSPs, it looks like you can basically buy all the cars you ever get to see in any color .

As some of the reviews already mentioned, the framerate drops to 30fps while racing in ad-hoc mode. It didn't bother me much though, the game played surprisingly good in ad-hoc, really dug it and could see me doing that a lot. The only thing I really missed is being able to watch a replay of the race. It's not a big surprise, but I still would have liked it a bunch.

Oh and as a reminder, there are two ways to use this functionality online - get the Ad-Hoc application from the Japanese Store (which I'm about to do shortly) or use X-Link Kai (or whatever it is called again) to use your PC as a portal.

I'm using ... the only new things versus this instruction so far seem to be that there are 6 updates to download. Interesting by the way that this download from the PSN store installed automatically. Maybe that always happens now if you don't do a background download?

 

You mean this official list from the GT site?

http://eu.gran-turismo.com/local/gb/data1/products/gtpsp/carlist.html

I just bought this one yesterday:
40 Audi R8 LMS Race Car (Team PlayStation) '09

Very nice and definitely rather new . Also already have more or less my own car (pearl white prius '03 ) and a bunch of other favorites.