gran turismo 4
the playstation 2 disc tray retracts. sony logo, polyphony logo, then a fade to black and the first bass notes of a jazzy menu theme. i am ten years old, sitting cross legged a foot from the tv, playing the only game i will ever own for the ps2. it is the greatest driving game of all time, gran turismo 4.
there is an utterly ridiculous range of vehicles - from the 1886 daimler, the first car ever made with a one horsepower one cylinder half-brass contraption bolted to a wooden horse carriage, to the carbon fiber formula gran turismo with a nearly 1,000 horsepower naturally aspirated v12.
the licensing system was ridiculous as well. in order to unlock progressively higher tiers of race, which would allow one to drive progressively higher performance cars, there were a series of license trials. i remember in particular the final one, whipping a 1980s prototype mercedes around the most famous racetrack in the world, nürburgring. imagine asking a ten-year-old to drive a racecar flat out for seven minutes straight? it was the longest license trial, by far, but after hundreds of tries i barely cleared it by a few seconds. to this day i can still remember boxy ribbed taillights and every corner on the track.
despite then state of the art driving physics, crashes were unmodeled. cars would simply bounce off the walls and each other, so the beginnings of races would often look like a bumper car extravaganza. my favorite strategy was not braking at all into the first corner so i could bounce off a computer opponent to round the hairpin and skip a few positions. repeating this on every high speed corner would handily win me most races.
complementing the normal first-person mode was a mode called b-spec where one took the role of a crew chief. gt4 introduced the modern idle game before it was cool. i would do my homework while my simulated driver drove hours-long endurance races at triple speed, looking up occasionally to tell the driver to make a pass or change his tires.
eventually, sick of bumping/idling through the same races over and over again to afford my next vehicle, i convinced my parents to let me buy a cheat code device for the ps2. i enabled max money and watched as my cash count literally ran off the screen on account of having too many digits. this must be what an arab crown prince felt filling his garage.
beyond gameplay, feast your ears on one of the best menu songs of all time, on the tier of "wii shop channel" and "halo title screen". every time i selected the campaign i was greeted by "the motorious zone", a wholly unexpected piece of jazz fusion for japanese petrolheads. countless hours were spent jamming to funky bass, punctuated by an occasional sax or guitar riff as i decided which of my forty nissan gt-r to pull out of the garage.
maybe a core component which made gt4 compelling was that i was young and impressionable. the tire physics are pitiful in comparison to modern models, which are as good as the simulators used by f1 drivers to train. i look back at the graphics today; a far cry from anything released in the last ten years, which look so real that most people would be hard pressed to tell rendered screenshots from a real photo.
regardless - buy me a 911? no. take me back to hazy days on the carpet, moving an analog stick, trying to go one second faster.