Reviews// GT Pro Series (Wii)

You come flying around the corner sideways in an insane drift, your speed of 100-mph eases you past a Skyline GT-R, your car touches the redline at 7,000-rpm and leaves streaks of rubber to mark your progress. Sounds great that doesn't it? Problem is, your car is a Nissan Micra. It redlines at 7,000-rpm because all cars in GT Pro Series redline then. It's front-wheel drive and therefore will not be sticking rubber to the tarmac and, even if it was RWD, the engine would most certainly not light up the back wheels in fifth gear whilst you were travelling at 100-mph or so.

GTPS comes with a title screen disclaimer that the cars represented do not bear handling and performance likenesses to their real-world counterparts, though it should really outline that all the cars are exactly the same. The go at about the same speed, they handle in exactly the same way, they have the exact same engine characteristics, they're all powered by the rear wheels, and they’re all capable of drifting around every corner with a mindless stabbing at the accelerator. Developers MTO took the worst elements of Initial D and endless Gran Turismo clones to bring you a title that sets videogames back some half a decade.

This first thing notice about GT Pro Series is the graphical presentation of this new racer. It looks considerably worse than Ridge Racer 5 did when it launched with the PlayStation 2. It is less detailed (though slightly higher resolution) than Gran Turismo 2. It is an eyesore, an abomination of computer-generated art and stands as one of the worst-looking games, pro-rated against it's host machine, ever.

The general awfulness of GT Pro is so strong, it almost warps the mind. With so many of your delicate human senses being bombarded with digital shite all at the same time, it's hard to tell what's hurting the most at any particular moment. So, to fully outline what a truly shocking videogame this is, I'm going to take it back to the old school and examine graphics, sound and playability in isolation.

Graphical Awfulness
Starting with graphics, the first thing you'll notice if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself playing GT Pro is that the courses are laughably rendered, with endless repeating ultra-low detail objects passing by. It's barely anti-aliased, with glitchy incidental awfulness whipping by in a very predictable, boring way. It becomes a tough ask to fully explain just how bad the track detail is in this game. It has less attention to detail paid than pretty much any racing game on arcade or home console ever: really, ‘Ever’, an evocative word I know. But it's a fact.

I am a racing game enthusiast, taking everything the genre throws at me. Be it the simulation of Live for Speed, its toned down sibling, Polyphony's Gran Turismo; be it Initial D Arcade, Outrun 2 or F-Zero in its many guises - as long as it's good, I'll play it and enjoy it. This being the case, I've played a lot of racing games. I think that this is probably the worst-looking in real-terms, I've ever seen.

True story: Bonnie, a neighbour of mine, was part of the Wii non-gamer test piece I conducted last week. She was briefed on the Virtual Console concept. Popping over for a glass of wine yesterday, she asked me how much GT Pro costs. I told her a staggering $50. "I thought those games were like $10 at the most though..." She thought it was a download from the N64 library.

The cars are cell-shaded, the environments are not. So, the effect is lost entirely and instead of creating a cartoony world that would suit the gameplay somewhat better, the result is a horrible mismatch of styles. The cars are roughly finished and jagged. The only positive here is that in Garage mode, the cars look like realistic representations of those deployed by their respective manufacturers. There is simulated environmental mapping on the cars, reminding me again of a scaled-down RR5...