My Diaries

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

Thursday March 02, 2000

I Finally Finish All of Gran Turismo 2

My game log, tm-30 has now been finished.

I did manage to win all the GT League and Special Event races without entering any event twice, and also without selling non-redundant prize cars. Because I had been collecting historical cars as well, I needed to sell the Speed 12 in order to get Cr2,000,000 to do Pike's Peak. The garage is essentially full.

Anyway, after doing all the GT League, Special Event, Enduros, and Rally Events, that left all those stupid little manufacturers' races you find under the Events button at many Manufacturers' Dealership screens. I eventually worked my way through them.

As I previously said, I usually found that buying merely supersoft tires, and the second level of power improvement for the car was more than adequate. If the car has a racing category as well, then I also did Weight Reduction 3 (since that is necessary to do Racing Modification in GT2), but if it didn't I didn't bother. The hardest AI cars to beat, actually, seemed to be the Peugeot 106's. Some of the British race-mods seemed a bit more spirited than usual, too, particularly the Aston Martins. Yet I still beat them with turbo spec 2 and super-soft tires only, using no suspension tuning. (But, as one would guess, since I had a 100%/1.00 average, I reset over all losses )

When I ran out of cash, I won Stars/RedRock with the [R]Denso Sard Supra, to bankroll a few more cars.

I entered that race ten extra times, meaning I needed about Cr5,500,000 to finance all the races, which is about half of what I had estimated with rough guesses. In addition, I entered the Trial Mountain race of the Pure Sports set one extra time, so that I could keep a tuned Tuscan in addition to the one I race-modified. Essentially I could just have done the Cr85,000 upgrade to my existing car, so, although the one victory, winning a Cr500,000 car was equivalent to spending Cr500,000, it was somewhat optional. In fact, I spent a little more money because I had to duplicate the weight-reduction and super-soft tires and engine tuning.

When I finished, I had Cr484,960 left. That was on simulation day 237.

Something really annoyed me. I had been doing all this racing using the original buggy version of Gran Turismo 2 I had bought in December. As expected, I only got to 98.20%, even after doing the Event Generator events.

So, I booted the "new" version of the Simulation Disk I had purchased a couple of weeks ago. To my surprise, when I went to the Status Screen, the percentage completed still said 98.20%

My new copy, does fix the Muscle Car licenses, and the "Nomal" Event title in the Event Generator. Perhaps, just possibly, it does not fix the percentage complete bug. That is, perhaps there are more than just two versions of Gran Turismo 2 being distributed in North America.

A more serious incompatibility I noticed with my new version is that the location and/or order of the Time Trial and Rally records does not seem to be the same. This means that, in both Arcade and Simulation Mode, you get incorrect lap time records shown if you load from a save made by the old game. This is very annoying. License status and records seem okay, as does the general state of the garage, and even the few Machine Test records I had set. But it appears that even if you try and merge records from an old game save into a new one, it does not know how to translate the location of the records.

I looked at the game disks with a PC, and, indeed, the Arcade Mode disk is different. Indications are that the new Arcade Mode disk will create records which the new Simulation Mode Disk will recognize, but I haven't actually tested it yet to verify that. I left my old Simulation Mode disk at home. Some day when I bring it in, I will post an entry here with the details of how the different disks I have look to a PC.