GT4
I had every intention of going cycling last night after work, but other circumstances prevailed. My rear tire was missing a large chunk of rubber -straight down to the chords- and my intestines were unhappy with a pasta lunch. Rather than push it and risk further illness, I went home and fired up the PS2.Gran Turismo is a pretty neat series of racing games and the latest version, 4, does not disappoint. Until, that is, you've been playing it for a few years and then it starts to get boring. Add to that the thought of sitting in front of it for many, many hours to complete the grueling, real-time endurance races, and things go downhill fast.
Fortunately, There's an alternate function on the game that allows me to relinquish driving during the race and act as a race director. Essentially, I act as a crew chief and simply watch the race unfold while I plan pit strategy. No more burning, dry eyes from staring at the screen for hours on end or falling into a state of sheer boredom seeing as how there are only 6 cars on the track during races. Instead, I get to see the race either live -from any car on the track- or from the pit monitor where I can speed the race up by two or even three times. So, instead of sitting there for three to four hours with bleeding eyes, I can sit back and be done with a race in only an hour or so.
Although I'm not doing the race driving, I am responsible for setting up the car before the race so that the computer driver can run fast laps. The computer driver is, of course, not nearly as fast as one would hope if the car is not either inch perfect or extremely neutral and predictable. If the car ends up being a litttle loose, the problem will only be worse with him driving. Tire choice and fuel consumption are pretty important, and I am also given the ability to select the driver's pace during the race. I can tell him to go slow, easy, steady, fast or push, depending on the situation in the race and the relative speed of my competition. Quite why I would need to go anything but fast or push is beyond me. Maybe it is my car choice or set-up, but so far I have need to use those two exclusively just to keep pace during the events.
So far, I have competed in a handful of races with various cars, but my favorite is the Amuse S2000 R1 that runs in street tire equipped classes. I'm usually up against big V8 monsters so having a nice lightweight 4 cylinder makes for fewer pit stops and long lasting tires. On par with this strategy was a Lotus Motorsport Elise that nearly defeated me, but 5 pit stops to my two made for an easy win. My closest race came in a BMW M3 GTR, where the margin of victory was just over two tenths of a second after three game hours of racing!
There are three full 24 hour events built into the game, but I'm not sure if I'll be competing in any of them. Even with the pace increased three-fold the event would take eight hours... a bit much to be sitting about watching a race unfold without commentators. I have started keeping lap charts to help pass the time, along with cooking & eating dinner and catching up on reading.
- Tsukuba 9 Hour - 1st place - Subaru STi race car (+16 laps)
- Grand Valley 300km - 1st Place - BMW M3 GTR (+.238 sec)
- El Capitan 200 - 2nd Place - Amuse S2000 R1 (-8 sec)
- El Capitan 200 - 1st Place - Amuse S2000 R1 (+14 sec)
posted by GreSam @ 08:40
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