GT 64 - Championship Edition
Reviewed by Scott McCall
One year removed from Ocean's surprisingly fun but short
Multi-Racing Championship comes a different kind of racing
game courtesy of the same development team. GT 64 - Championship
Edition takes advantage of the current popularity of Touring
Car racing. However, as such, most of this popularity stems
from Europe and Japan, not the U.S. And, unfortunately, it is
neither a good GT game nor a good racing game, period.
The most glaring problem with GT 64 - Championship Edition
is the lack of tracks. One of MRC's biggest problems was a lack
of tracks, and somehow the developers chose to ignore our pleas for
more. The game has been promoted as having six tracks, but as
far as I'm concerned, that's simply not true. There are three
tracks -- Japan, U.S., and Europe -- with a short and a long
variation of each. That's how they came up with six. Three times
two may be six, but when the long variations have you driving
through most of the same portions of the track with only a
different turn-off, then I don't see how you can consider them
as separate tracks. Nowadays, any racing game without a minimum
of six distinct, unique tracks shouldn't even be released. Pitiful.
As expected, GT 64 has the usual gameplay modes. There's a
Championship mode (possibly a partial saving grace to the
replay value) in which you must beat short and long variations
of each track, and there's a point system used with it. There
are only eight cars on the track at once. Stupidly, GT 64 requires
you to compete in 24-lap races if you want to truly to complete the
game. Setting the number of laps to 3, 6, or 12 will only let you
reach the semifinals. Also, it forces you to qualify for position.
Why can't qualifying be an optional thing? Along the way, when
you pick higher numbers of laps, you will have to make pit
stops, too. You'll also find Time Trial and Battle modes in GT
64. Time Trial is your standard fare, as you can save your best
times to the cartridge. There's no saving of ghosts this time,
though. Battle mode is a one-on-one race against a second player,
computer or human. Yeah, that's right, no computer competition in this
game's two-player mode, either. Why do developers torture us so?
The control in GT 64 has a very different feel to it, and each of
the 14 officially licensed cars and their racing teams varies
that feel slightly more. It almost feels as if there's non-stop
power-sliding around every turn. If you're an arcade racing
fan like me, you might being thinking that sounds great. Well,
it's not. It can be difficult to keep the car on the road. You'll
have trouble with the car sliding into walls around the bends
and revving up the RPMs too high, which really slows you
down. Speaking of which, the game is not so realistic in that
respect. You'll often find that smacking into walls and other
cars yields higher speeds than hitting the brake too much. There
is supposedly car deterioration in longer-lap races, however.
There are a few other things I should probably mention. First,
interestingly enough, you have your choice between the Control
Pad and Control Stick. The Control Stick is probably the better
choice. Second, the game has a decent replay feature that lets you
change the camera distance and views. It won't wow you like a
Gran Turismo or F-1 World Grand Prix replay, though. Third,
like MRC before it, you can tweak your car setup in GT 64. But
it's not as sophisticated or as user-friendly as NASCAR 99 or
F-1 World Grand Prix.
Besides uninspired, stale gameplay and touchy-feely control,
GT 64 is also lacking in the audio/visual department. The
one-player mode looks barely better than a 32-bit game, only
because the graphics are a little cleaner. The three tracks
are nicely varied with some detailed backgrounds. The cars
are modeled fairly well, too. But that's as good as it gets.
There are problems with pop-up, along with some frame
rate drops and clipping errors. Where the game really suffers
is in the two-player mode. Although a two-player split
screen isn't reduced in size like MRC, the graphics basically
loose all their luster, the frame rate really drops, the amount
of pop-up significantly increases, and there are only two
cars on the track! It looks absolutely terrible in the two-player
mode. And what about the sound? Awful. There's no music while
racing in any mode, there's almost no voice, and the sound effects
are pretty bad. So let me ask this: Where did all those 128 megabits
go to? Development teams like Iguana can squeeze more into a
32-megabit cartridge than Genki can put into a 128-megabit cartridge.
GT 64 - Championship Edition is a serious candidate for worse
game of the year on the N64. The control may appeal to Grand
Touring fans, but there are still the problems of sub-par graphics,
stale gameplay thanks to predictable AI and not enough speed,
a horrible two-player mode, only three lousy tracks, and terrible
sound. I recommend you avoid this at all costs -- that is, unless
you're a huge fan of this type of racing game. Even then, rent so
you won't have to repent.
Graphics: 2.9 out of 5
Sound: 1.2 out of 5
Control: 2.6 out of 5
Gameplay: 2.3 out of 5
Lastability: 1.7 out of 5
Overall: 2.0 out of 5