LihapullaPoju

GRAN TURISMO 7

I could say alot of things about this game, lets start with release; my copy shipped to me 6 days later than realease day, I was so excited to play hoping it would lean more in to past GTs and while Sport is fine, its not 100% what I'm after. This game feels like it was built on Sport's foundation.

All the most enjoyable features in 7 come from earlier GTs, like the tuning of your shitboxes to make them your own track weapons and more single player elements. I also love he legendary car dealership, which offers variety of old road and race cars with race cars being my favorite thing to collect in the game. Always happy to add another Group C monster to my garage.

Bugs and bugs and server outages, at the very start some of the license tests were bugged where dirt driving trials had normal road tires put on, thus making gold medals impossible. There was also a period where the game was down for 30 hours due to issue with a earlier patch. Connections in sport mode have been mostly okay, encountered some issues. While not a bug per se, roulette tickets are a joke with them always giving me the lowest reward possible (10k credits usually).

Sport mode is back in full force, serving up race A, B, C weekly. It's a good time if you can take the time to practise and do qualifying for hours because believe me, you don't want to be at the back with no time set. (Monza T1 feels) Tuning was discussed alot in release cycle, and they enabled tuning in first set of daily races, but since then it has never come back, and it's only been BoP races, so what was the point? Maybe because in Sport you didn't have to worry about tunes.

The trophies are the easiest from any GT ive played, I have no idea why PD and sony did this, I'm partly thankfull because I dont want to try golding the nordschleife again and I never won any races against real people in Sport. Only infuriating part is the vagueness of the 3 legendary cars trophy, no one was able to unlock said trophy until the Ferrari 330 P4 was available in legendary cars shop and that was the last piece of the puzzle, the 2 other needed cars are Jag XJ13 and Ford GT40 MkIV.

Overall after 2 months of content support I am saddened so say it's just okay. Kazunori-san hopes we play this over a long period of time while this game grows and I can understand that request, but the launch woes made me much more pessimistic for the future. I am not going to buy anymore games on release, which is a shame because test drive unlimited solar crown is coming fall 2022 and I am way more attached to tdu on a personal level. (even though tdu 2’s driving sucked)

DIRT 5 (2020)

What a pleasant surprise, I enjoyed this far more than GRiD. Compared to rest of DIRT series, 5 is really arcadey in feel and atmosphere. cars and trucks are really easy to throw around corners and keep away from walls. Atmosphere is arcadey because it's so full of colours and party vibes. Every racing venue feels like a party with track decor and crowds. Only thing that comes close in ease of driving is DIRT showdown.

I originally started following this game due to inclusion of Nolan Sykes and James Pumphrey from the YT channel Donut media (they're a huge automotive channel and i've watched them for 3 years, fyi) they do a decent job but I don't like how they host THE donut podcast in the game and not an in universe podcast.