First the good news for prospective PS3 owners: when you buy your next-gen consoles in March, you will be able to get some 1080p
Gran Turismo action. What’s more, you won’t have to pay a penny for it –
Gran Turismo HD Concept will be available as a free download from the PlayStation Network. At a not overly painful 691 megabytes, you couldn’t imagine any of those PlayStation 3 early adopters not opting to get their mitts on it.
But now the bad news: there’s a reason why it’s only a 691Mb download – it’s very much a demo, and a pretty sketchy one at that. What you get for your (lack of) money are one measly track – an enormously twisty, hairpin bend-ridden and short section of road set in the shadow of the Eiger mountain in the Swiss Alps – ten cars and two driving modes, only one of which is instantly available when you get the game running for the first time.
Installation, at least, is dead easy – once you’ve finished the download, you simply seek out the Install Package File option on the Cross-Media Bar’s Game menu, and it auto-detects and installs. A
Gran Turismo HD Concepticon then appears in the Game menu and, joy of joys, you can now run a game straight off the hard disk of a Sony console.
The menu that greets you has the options Time Trial, Drift Trial, Rankings, Replay Theatre, Options and User’s Manual, with Drift Trial greyed out until you have unlocked all ten cars. Note the absence of any Multiplay option – you can’t yet play
Gran Turismo HD Concept against other PS3 owners. Although, Sony assures us, your Rankings will exist online, giving you an idea of where you stand globally.
In Options, you can set Display settings (modifying the HUD, the info displayed during replays and switch between mph and km/h), set up any Logitech steering wheels you might have to work with the game, toggle between 1080p, 1080i and 720p, and set up autosaving.
If you want to play, the only initial choice available is Time Trial, and the first time you play the game, you are forced to drive the laughably underpowered 1995 Suzuki Cappuccino. Choose the colour of your ride and you are given a Driving Options menu, allowing you to toggle between auto and manual, turn Stability Management on and off, set the traction control from 0 to 10, choose between racing, sports or normal tyres front and rear and set the course direction (another option unavailable until you’ve unlocked all the cars).
At least unlocking all ten cars is hardly a challenge. At the beginning of each Time Trial session, you’re given a target lap time and, if you beat it, you’ll open the next car. Contrary to the previously hardcore spirit of the full
Gran Turismo games, the target times are ridiculously easy to achieve. So, you find yourself doing maybe a couple of laps behind the wheel of each car, then quitting to get your next car.
