What's in your GT4 Gararge?

i just picked up GT4, (i have all of the GT series now, from the original to 4) and every time i play a new version, i have always been pleasantly surprised by the sheer volume of cars available, GT4 really rases the bar this time, the classics in 4 range from the first horseless carriages to some well known classics, as well as a couple of “futuristic” cars

what makes it really fun is the “classic” cars in the game, sure, it has all the modern vehicles, but it also has some rather unique cars…

here’s what’s in my gararge…

1915 Ford Model T Roadster (i hate ford, but even i can’t resist this classic)
'70 Chapparal 2J “Sucker car” (a dual engine “LeMans style” car, a big block Chevy 8 provides power, a smaller 250cc snowmobile engine creates a suction downforce to plant the car on the road better)
Subaru 360
'54 Citroen 2CV
'63 Honda S500
Dodge Charger ('70 and '71 Super Bee) (i have the '70 tweaked so hard i can burn rubber in all 5 gears)
'62 Lotus Elan
'71 Plymouth Barracuda
'70 Plymouth Superbird
'73 BMW 2002 Turbo
'76 VW Golf GTI
'68 VW Karmann Ghia
'49 VW Beetle 1100
'54 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing
1886 Benz Patent Motor Wagen (a 3 wheeled horseless carriage)
1886 Dalmer Motor Carriage (horseless carriage)
'37 Audi Streamline V-16 race car
2022 Nike (yes, the shoe company) One, a sort of “Tron-esque” electric racer that you drive in a prone position

and…
the DeLorean DMC-12 (only problem is it’s missing the Flux Capacitor and Time Travel circuitry…)

and, since i drive a basic Dodge Neon, i was pleased to see that it’s high performance sibling, the SRT-4 is in the game, and i can say from experience, the SRT-4/Neon handles and sounds the way it does in real life, so i’d imagine the other cars are just as accurate

so, what’s in your GT4 gararge?

Here’s a link to the Motor Trend review of the game, complete with full car list

No ZIL limos! How bogus!

Let’s see, no Auburns, no Cords, no Duesenbergs, no Lincolns, no Packards, and no Studebakers (and no Tuckers, either, damn it). All the companies I mentioned produced vehicles during their existence which were known for being some of the fastest cars on the planet, in fact, most of the speed records at the salt flat racing area in Utah are held by Studebakers. Yet, not one of them get’s a nod in the game.

What, no Nucleon? No Chevrolet Turbine? No Cugnot’s steam wagon? No VW Kubelwagen? No Megaweapon?

Well, it’s got the old Beetle and a Lotus Esprit. I guess.

:wink:

Subrau Imprezza WRX type R
Nissan Skyline GT-R
Toyota RSC Rally Raid Car
Lotus Esprit V8 SE
Toyota Tacoma X-Runner(bleh)
Toyota MR2 Spyder
MUGEN MOTUL CIVIC Si Race Car
Autobianchi A112 Abarth
Honda CIVIC SiR - II (EG)
NISMO 270R
Toyota SPRINTER TRUENO BZ-R
Pontiac Sunfire GXP Concept
Toyota VITZ F
Ford RS200
Cadillac CIEN
Nissan SKYLINE 2000GT-B
Mazda BP FALKEN RX-7
Mazda Mazdaspeed 6
Chevrolet Silverado SST Concept
Chrylsler Prowler
NIKE One 2022
Toyota Motor Triathlong Race Car
Mercury Cougar XR-7
Ginetta G4
Mazda Mazda6 Concept
Lotus Esprit Turbo HC

Sorted by “Driven” and I’ve only driven the first 12 of them right now. I won most of the ones I have not driven, but might in the future. My favorite is the Esprit V8 pretty much.
It surprises me that can you get prize cars that are worth so much very early in the game. (the Civic-only race gets you 5,000 credits for first place, and a 95.000 credit car that you can win over and over… with the car you win.) There are other easier ones with better rewards, but I won’t spoil it heheh

No damage engine? No online play? Suckers!

You forgot the awesome AI, as well.

Bad, huh? I play Race Driver 2 on the XBox, and apart from the great damage engine, the other drivers don’t cut you any slack: try taking an inside line on a corner and bashing into other cars to brake, and you’ll be spun off the track with a smashed front and a busted radiator {which will slow you down} before you can say Little Pig Robinson.

I’m not saying GT4 is perfect by any means, it’s a great sim, just a few minor quibbles…

as stated before, the lack of damage modeling, and a primitive AI are downsides, the CPU cars unerringly follow a preset line, plowing into you if you happen to be in their way, it does detract slightly from the sim experience, i mean, c’mon, the Burnout series of arcade racers have damage modeling, and traffic tries to avoid your car (esp. if you’re driving on the wrong side of the road, into oncoming traffic :wink: ), and the crash physics are reasonably accurate, it’s just got a floaty, arcadey feel

still, it’s GT4’s attention to detail that makes the game great, when driving the Chaparral 2J you hear the rumble of the Chevy big block and the whine of the ducted fan motor that’s sticking you to the road, the Citroen 2CV has the unique sputtering cough of the “tin snail”, the Charger and 'Cuda have the throaty rumble and roar of the mighty Hemi, and when driving them, you can feel the massive weight of the car as it struggles to hold the line thru corners, and the squeal of the tires as you burn rubber in 5th gear when you give the engine too much gas and it breaks the tires free of their grip

the Neon tends to understeer in hard corners (just like in real life) and the raspy whine of the Neon under hard acceleration is faithfully reproduced here

when i was driving the classic Beetle around the High Speed Ring (what am i, a glutton for punishment? :wink: ) i realized, wait a minute, the engine noise is coming from my surround sound spealers, not the main ones…wait, that makes sense, the Beetle is a rear engine, rear drive car…

i know i’ve been focusing on the sound, but the physics model is reasonably accurate as well (it loses points for lack of a damage modeling system, but i guess that’s a concession Polyphony made to the car manufacturers who didn’t want their precious car images getting trashed…), if you take an old classic car (Charger) into a tight corner too fast, the rear end starts to break free first, then the entire car drifts sideways, if you’ve got your Viper at WOT and you’re fast approaching a tight corner, you’ll experience brake fade as you frantically try to slow your car before it plows into the barrier…

if Polyphony could have incorporated Burnout 3’s AI, damage, and crash models into the rest of the game, GT4 would be perfection…

on a scale of 1 to 10, i’d rate GT4 as an 8.8

oh, and i forgot to say, the award for the “most fun but useless” cars goes to the “1 HP Wonders”…

1886 Benz Patent Motor Wagen
1886 Dalmer Motor Carriage
1915 Ford Model T Roadster

you’ll never win a race with one (unless you’re playing for “slowest time”), but it’s fun to putter around in the vehicles that started it all…even if their top speed is 15 MPH (Benz and Dalmer) to 55 MPH (ford)

The Mercedes Gull Wing is a beaut, after upgrades I just leave it over night in B-Spec to win those European 1000mile challenge games.

The Mazda 757b Race Car is great at finnishing the Pro Championship.

I love this game. I’ve been playing a lot of GT3, GT4 Prologue, and GT4 (including several early demo versions) these last two years and got me the Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel. Most fun I’ve had was when I joined up with lots of other GT3 fans for i.Link matches (sort of LAN parties, where you hook up 6 PS2s at a time and race each other for some really decent competition). I’ve organised some of them myself and went to a few in among others Germany, awesome fun. No matter which GT board you visit, you’re likely to come by my name at some point, especially if you try to find me. :smiley:

I imported the Chinese version of GT4 a while ago, and tomorrow or the day after I’ll get the European version. I’m not in a hurry, as my hunger has already been satisfied with the full Chinese version, but it will be nice to play this on the big widescreen 100hz TV (now I don’t because 60hz doesn’t look too good when converted to 100hz Digital Scan).

These days I’m no longer that competitive anymore not in the sense that I’m slow but in the sense that I don’t spend the time needed to get top times in the databases (e.g. http://db.granturismo.de/index.php - my current favorite). I still do pretty well in live racing, because the skills I developed in overtaking, holding a line, withstanding pressure and so on help, but I’m no longer a likely top 5 finisher I think - and with lots of old and new champs being drawn back in, I probably won’t be for a while either, but you never know.

I have a GT4 log up and running at http://forums.gttimes.com/viewtopic.php?t=9533, and this forum is really the first time I got into the forum thing, 2 years ago, and I just passed the 4000 post mark there.

I also am the author of a nice little bit of software that you can use to manage GT3 replay files with (upto and including GT4 Prologue, but GT4’s files are coded differently and I haven’t figured it out - I’m basically waiting for someone else to do that for me, I suck at encryption/decryption stuff - but once it’s straight binaries I can find my way around a file).

At the height of my GT days, somewhere this summer :D, I even wrote some columns on it for IGN (http://cars.ign.com). I got fed up with the game a bit after hosting the fourth installment of the Board’s Challenge, the biggest online GT event currently existing, with 11 teams of each 10 drivers taking part in 9 races, resulting in 170 replays. I guess I OD’d a little on the thing. :wink:

Now I’m back to quietly enjoying playing this game occasionally, getting golds in the licences and filling up my garage, as the GT4 log shows. I’ll still definitely be visiting and occasionally hosting GT4 LAN Parties though, as that’s just too much fun and I’ve made a lot of great friends there. I’ll probably slip in the occasional online competition (where you race and then send in a file of your replay so people can check if you’ve been driving legal).

I did manage to play GT4 game online already through xlink kai as mentioned elsewhere, which was fun as I found a few drivers that I was a really good match with and we had some good racing. But it’s also a hassle and time-consuming affair unfortunately (partly due to problems with my HUB/Router config making it practically impossible to play with more than 1 other player), as well as a tad addictive, so I’m keeping away from that for the moment. We’ll see how it turns out with the PAL version.

Nowadays, I’m finding a lot more and healthier fun in playing DDR, and that’s consequently getting more floor-time (heh). But GT4 is something special, with it’s photo-mode and it’s 750+ cars and stunning realism. Sure, the AI of the other drivers suck, and there is no damage (though I see that also as a plus to be honest), but the feeling of driving the car is extremely realistic, the cars look awesome in the game, it has really improved my understanding of car-handling (in all its different guises), and those light-blue numbers* keep being addictive.

*those that play will know I mean the numbers indicating how much faster you were this lap than in your previous fastest lap, meaning that you’ve yet again found a small improvement in your line, braking point, etc.

I am guessing you have to be a career driver of sorts to get a garage full of cars. While I love the GT3 experience (and the GT4 I’m sure), do I have to do the whole role playing thing?

In GT3, if I just want to dabble in the game, I get a paltry selection of tracks and cars.

Would I suffer the same way in GT4? (am I missing out on cheats???)

I have alot of hobbies(my poor wife)…go to school and work like a dog, so I can’t spend the time on GT3 ot GT4, but would love to experience all the rides or alot of them!

Any feedback?

Oh, wow! It has Leno’s 810-HP Tank Car! Why is it called a tank car? It’s built around a 1792 cubic inch engine from a M-47 Patton Tank!

I jost bought a TVR Cerbera speed 12 in the game. Wow. A production car that can cross the 1hp/kg barrier and the best paint choices arround.
Here’s some real life pics of the car.