Gran Turismo

Before I get to reviewing, I should note that I've played this on both on a real PSP and on an emulator. If you play this on the emulator, GTPSP earns at least a whole extra point above its PSP experience due to being able to use your own controller and eliminating the loading times. Being able to play GT4 tracks with GT4 cars on my own laptop is great, though being able to take them with me on a PSP is comparably novel.
When I say I played this on an emulator, I mean I completed it 100% on an emulator. Because my hands had too much nerve pain to hold a normal controller, that means I had to gold all of the challenges with a keyboard. It was horrifying.

My focus on Gran Turismo revolves around setting lap times on each track with various cars. GTPSP seems like it's tuned towards that mindset, seeing as the gameplay stripped down purely to its cars and tracks. It has almost every car and track from Gran Turismo 4, which by PSP standards is an impressive amount of content. It's missing the night tracks and a handful of the silly cars from GT4, so no Tank Car or Model T here, unfortunately.

Looking through the game's unused files (see: tcrf.net), it appears as if the game was supposed to contain every track from Gran Turismo 4 and tracks from Gran Turismo 3, as well. I would have loved if Special Stage Route 11 and Complex String were in this track list, though other lengthy classics like Nurburgring and Le Mans still remain. Curiously, Valencia and Cathedral Rocks III are present here, while they appear in no other GT games.

The game is most widely criticized for its lack of event mode, which it tries to make up for by implementing a massive 'driving challenge' mode instead. Unlike previous GT games, the player doesn't have to get higher than bronze on these to unlock everything. For the 100% completionist type (i.e. me), this is a nightmare, as it's equivalent to a license test mode with 102 golds to acquire! This is only marginally less than the amount of timed challenges you'll have to face in GT4. While GTPSP has no 'mission 34', there are multiple challenges that took me over an hour to get gold on. I'm sure GT vets will be enthralled knowing that there is yet another difficult test that utilizes the first half of Trial Mountain. It's a passing challenge!

The 'passing' challenges are quite annoying. You don't need to beat a specific time to get gold, but you have to pass the other AI cars on a section of a track before you get to the finish. This seems easy as first, but these challenges quickly reach familiar levels of frustrating GT difficulty once you realize you can't touch any of the other AI cars. If they bump into you, it's a fail. This means in addition to having to learn the track, you have to learn the timing and path of each AI car at a given point so they don't end up colliding into you. This requires some skillful precision on your part. There are also some anti-cheesing tactics added to the other challenges. In GT4, you could sometimes 'skate' the walls of the rally tracks to get an easy gold. In GTPSP, touching the barriers will insta-fail you.
As a funny side note, even the demonstration video doesn't beat the gold time on some of the challenges!

Unfortunately, these challenges make up the bulk of the game's playable content. Once you complete the last challenge with a gold you unlock.... nothing. You receive no reward or even a 'good job!' message once you have a gold on everything, leaving me to believe the devs didn't expect anybody to actually bother doing it. After you're done with that, you can increase your 'rank' on each track by beating it 7 times or so (with increasingly difficult AI). But beyond that, all you have left is yourself, your cars, and the tracks. Each car has its own informative description, similar to in GT5, so you could spend a good amount of time reading through your new Gran Turismo encyclopedia. Though you'll probably just want to race on the tracks! Each track has its own time leaderboard (and a drift leaderboard too???), though time trial junkies like myself will be devastated upon finding out that you can't change the gear ratios of the cars. In other words, I hope you like redlining! Not being able to adequately tune the cars adds a huge dent to this game's value.

There are a few other standout features, such as Jay Leno giving driving advice on the driving challenge demonstration videos. You can also add your own custom soundtrack to the game (once you unlock it by finishing a few driving challenges). This is fun to mess with, especially on emulator, where you can throw as many mp3 files in as you want without having to worry about storage space. This is also the first Gran Turismo game with a cockpit cam for the cars. It's only a blank interior, though getting to see the inside shape of each car is amusing.

At this point, I have to wonder why they decided not to add an event mode. Wouldn't that be one of the less difficult features to port over from GT4? Considering they managed to port massive tracks like Nurburgring and Grand Canyon, I'd imagine copying over the GT4 event graphics would be relatively easy. You can't traditionally unlock cars in the game as it is, so why not add in events as another source of winning money? Give us something to grind currency on other than the Test Course, please!

With all these oddities, I have to weigh the value of its content vs. its novelty. This is the only GT game where you can race on Citta di Aria against 3 opponents, the only portable GT game, the easiest GT game to add a custom soundtrack... Are the GTPSP strong points so great that it's worth playing this over Gran Turismo 4 itself? Without the traditional GT game progression, this feels somewhat empty. The amount of cars and tracks are impressive, though this doesn't beat playing the real thing.