Gran Turismo (PlayStation Portable)

Gran Turismo
Developer(s)	Polyphony Digital
Publisher	Sony Computer Entertainment
Designed by	Kazunori Yamauchi
Engine	Custom
Genre	Racing
Modes	Singleplayer, multiplayer
Rating	ESRB: E
Platform	PlayStation Portable
Input	PSP controls
Release date	October 1, 2009

Gran Turismo is a PlayStation Portable game developed by Polyphony Digital. The game was announced at the E3 2004 Sony press conference on May 11th, the same conference where Sony announced the PlayStation Portable, and after long amounts of delays, was released alongside the PSP Go model on October 1st, 2009.

Gran Turismo has the same courses that featured in Gran Turismo 4 with the exception of a few missing courses, along with two of its new tracks made available, Cathedral Rocks Trail III and Circuit de Valencia, currently these only appear in the PSP game.

Development

A Gran Turismo title for the PSP was announced as "Gran Turismo 4 Mobile" during the launch of the PlayStation Portable system in 2004 (at that year's E3), with mock box art, UMD, and a picture of Toyota Castrol TOM'S SUPRA '00 at Costa di Amalfi on a PSP screen released to the press, and a planned release date of April 2005. However, "GT4 Mobile" would make no further appearances at gaming shows featuring the PSP, such as 2004 Tokyo Game Show and 2005 E3, and the project was assumed as a vaporware. Kazunori Yamauchi, in an interview with Famitsu, assured that the project was still in progress in 2006, but in January 2008, IGN reported that GameStop had cancelled pre-orders of the game as the game had been considered as cancelled.

Five years to the original announcement of "GT4 Mobile", a Gran Turismo title for the PlayStation Portable was re-announced at the 2009 edition of E3, alongside Gran Turismo 5 and a new model on the PSP lineup, the PSP Go.

Coincidental to the release timing, the internal structure and code of the released game (along with some features such as Standard/Professional physics toggle in the car settings menu, a feature that appeared in GT5P) appears to be based on GT5P/GT5 instead of GT4, although most of the car/track assets came from GT4. Internally, the game is referred as GT5M.

Gameplay

The "Ready, Start" countdown and Driving Challenges voice-over is provided by car enthusiast and talk show host Jay Leno, with Houko Kawashima giving Japanese language Driving Challenges voice acting.

The game does not feature a career-based racing mode like previous titles, but rather an open-ended style where the player chooses a car, racetrack, competitor ability, and number of laps, and the game automatically determines the prize pot based on these parameters. There is also a driving challenges section, which is essentially a combination of the license tests and driving missions of Gran Turismo 4. There is no requirement for the player to complete these in order to race, but doing so grants them credits, with more money offered for silver and gold completion times, as well as other perks.

The default control layout is rather unusual, with the D-Pad up and down buttons used for shifting gears, and both X and Circle being used for acceleration, the handbrake being reassigned to the R button. The controls are however fully customizable by the player. Kazunori Yamanuchi dismissed the idea of using PSP Plus to allow players to control the cars using a DualShock 3 controller or steering wheel, saying "if you want to play on a PS3 controller, you will have to play Gran Turismo 5."

Music

This is the first game in the series not to feature different music for different game regions.

• Moon Over The Castle Orchestra Version - Masahiro Andoh
• rainbow 3000. - aM
• Moz - aM
• close my eyes, eyes, eyes. - aM
• stepping inside with outside. - aM
• Windy - Solaya
• ADDICTED TO THE 303 - YO-C & DJ SHIMAMURA
• Adrenalin Navigation - YO-C & DJ SHIMAMURA
• Summer Searching - YO-C & DJ SHIMAMURA
• over the horizon - MASANORI MINE
• planet tension - MASANORI MINE
• colorful monochrome - MASANORI MINE
• Menu & Jingles - aM, Yuki Oike
• Mastering Engineer - Toshiya Horiuchi
• 808PM @ THE BEACH - Fred Falke
• Be My Baby - Performed by Ryuichi Katsumata, Norihito Sumimoto; written by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich
• Cosmic Egg - Wolfmother
• Divine (Danger Remix) - Sebastien Tellier
• Do You - Adam Freeland
• Fist of God - MSTRKRFT
• LISZTOMANIA (Alex Metric Remix) - Phoenix
• Monday (Glitch Mob Remix) - Nalepa
• New Galaxy - EI-P
• No Regrets - King Khan & The Shrines
• Yippiyo-Ay - The Presets
• Stigma - Noisia
• Just One Second - London Elektricity
• On The Run - The Quemists
• When Ur Lonely - The Quemists
• Omen (Noisia Remix) - The Prodigy
• Borrowed Time - TC feat. Subfocus
• Aztec - Spor
  

Cars

Main article: Gran Turismo (PlayStation Portable)/Car List

Gran Turismo has over 800 vehicles to use. The game marks Bugatti's first appearance in the series, and Lamborghini's first appearance outside the Japanese version of Gran Turismo 3.

Save Locking

The following testing was done with the physical/UMD versions of the game only.

An image showcasing a save file warning on a memory card moved between PSPs or if the player moved the save file between memory cards via PC/PS3.

Presumably as an anti-cheating/hacking or region locking mechanism (DRM or car duplication prevention), GTPSP's save data is locked to the PSP on which it was created (but seemingly not the PSN account).

If the player attempts to load a save created with another PSP (PC/PS3 transfer or memory card swapped to another PSP), the game will prompt the player to overwrite the data from scratch or to quit the game to their PSP home menu.

This prompt does not appear on an emulator such as PPSSPP; for instance, if using a European save file on a US game, it will ignore the European save data and create a new US save; if the player is loading a European save with European copy of the game it will load it correctly and not display the warning like on real hardware.

For comparison, WipEout Pulse (another first-party PSP game), in both US and European region copies of the game. will load a different region's save file regardless of the environment.

Trivia

• Starting from this game, all the regional differences are all removed. This allows the player to purchase the cars that were formerly regional exclusive. (Vauxhall and Acura cars are some examples of regional exclusive cars).
  • This is because the PSP's UMD format is region free for videogames, stemming from widespread criticism by gamers about the necessity of regional lockouts for videogames on earlier formats. However, this also results in criticism regarding duplicated regional variations of cars, a noticeable problem in the PlayStation 3 era of the series.
  • Whilst the cover art remains the same across all regions, there are differences between the standard versions of the game in terms of the top box banner, both the North American version and the European version use the old look (albeit the European cover lacks the addition of the "Only on PlayStation" message), whilst the Japanese version uses the PS3-style box banner, this is peculiar because the game came out with a universal worldwide release date. The budget versions of this game eventually just used the PS3-style banner, no matter which region it came from.
• This is the last game in the series to use the word "Fail" on screen when a player fails a mission or a test. Starting with Gran Turismo 5, the word "Disqualified" appears in yellow text on screen.
  • Early versions of Gran Turismo 7 did use "Fail" for such conditions, but was quickly changed to "Try Again!".
• This is the third game in the series to implement the use of special cheats. Like in Gran Turismo 4, special cheats have been discovered for GTPSP, 14 years after its release, the main difference this time is that there are no additional requirements for cheats to be used. The cheats are as follows (the menu being reloaded confirms a correct entry):
  • 99,000,000 Credits: Hold Start + Select + L, then press Down, Square, Down, Left, Right, Triangle, Right, Square, Up, Down, Up, and Down.
  • Immediate access to all cars (in first base color): Hold Start + Select + R, then press Up, Right, Left, Left, Square, Up, Right, Right, Up, Triangle, Right, and Up.
• This is the first Gran Turismo game to include custom soundtracks for races, but it must first be unlocked by completing B or C from Driving Challenges.
• This is the first and only game to not have any night circuits included (such as the Special Stage Route 5), either due to time constraints or from hardware limitations.