My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Friday November 5, 1999

My Impressions of the Underground Jampack Gran Turismo 2 Demo

My wife really doesn't like watching the Underground Jampack Gran Turismo 2 Demo as much as she likes regular GT replays, although the GT2 demo is probably as good as the original GT *demo*. Somehow when they developed the original GT daylight tracks they fed back between design and implementation to help make sure the graphics could be made crisp, clean and non-repetitive. (Some of those giant Bonsai trees in the new demo look too identical to each other, even if they aren't).

It took us a while to realize you can change the colours of the cars in the arcade demo--including the "not available" ones. Red minis look very nice. But 62ps?

We also didn't realize for a while that there were two demos in the demo. Even though the replay theater is inaccessible, if you leave the demo sitting on the home screen for long enough it begins cycling through replays--I think I saw six before it then exited back to the Vault level. Speaking of inaccessible features, I sure hope GT2 lets you reconfigure your controllers as before. I don't suppose they've moved it to the pre-race screen where it belongs though.

The first replay was a dirt track rally-type course with a car time-trialing along it, tail-sliding, etc. (Sorry I'm not good with quick car ids...)

There is one featuring a Mini crawling its way to the lead in an urban course. It looks quite pathetic, actually. I mean the graphics looks quite accurate and everything, but the cars just look *SO* *SLOW*.

Probably the most impressive replay is a race among 70's muscle cars on a daylight urban course similar to the Driver world. There are lots of buildings, and few, if any, tunnels, and all the buildings look quite realistic. I always wondered if all the tunnels in GT1 were there for some nefarious reason (to let the graphics engine keep up or catch up, or something).

There are some sports cars driving around Laguna Seca (you can recognize the corkscrew, especially if you watched the Gran Turismo interview on the same disk), but the level of detail of that track is a little disappointing.

Another demo features racing-mod cars around a small low-bank oval track--you can recognize the Castrol Supra GT, although it looks like its styling has been "squashed" slightly from GT1.

And another race has sports cars going around good old night-time Special Stage R5; Big Ben is still there, but some parts of the course look slightly different, but I'd have to drive it to say for sure.

At least one of the replays had the same problem as GT had (e.g. at Grand Valley East ii on the straight towards the final hairpin) where the background would not be properly rendered, but shown only in very harsh pixels or blocks. (And similarly crowds in the stands are still squares of random colours). And "jiggling" of the contents of road-side adverts seems worse in the new demo. And it's impossible to see which way the orange arrows are pointing before you get too close to react properly. (Of course there was always DFRWii in the original GT where you could see the arrows, and had to remember they were still pointing the wrong way

Also, although you could change the car being tracked in a replay, by using the up/down buttons as in GT, I could only get it to cycle between in-car and telecast view; I couldn't get the replays to adopt a "chase" view. Also, the demo seems to have no way of getting either a rear-view mirror or a course map overlay.