SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Feature: Wheel Bad Driving

GTR and GT Legends are a bit like walking up to Anna Kournikova and asking her to dinner. Beautiful, a bit intimidating on the surface, and you’re pretty sure you’re about to crash and burn the minute you try it. Both simulations represent racing seasons from the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile’s GT Championship events. There’s our first problem. If the title of whatever you’re doing is in French, you know two things: it’s expensive and you won’t get decent-sized ice cubes in your drink. American tourists have long suspected that “Parlez-vous Francais?” is really French for “Visa or American Express?”

GTR

GT Legends represents the best thing to ever come out of decade or two that gave us bell-bottom pants, synthetic fabrics, recreational drug use, some startling STD rates, and about a billion failed marriages. GTR represents the best thing to come out of a decade of corporate theft, inflated tech stocks, and skyrocketing therapy bills because Mom won’t give Dad the beach house at Boca Raton in the divorce.

Simbin apparently wanted to recreate the complete feel of both eras, down to the menu music you hear while getting set up. GTR has some nice industrial/techno music playing in the background as you play around with the myriad of options and tweaks available to you. GT Legends has the same thing, but with more of a groovy 60s and 70s feel. I wanted to feel a little immersion for the time frame I was in, and neither of these titles failed to hit the mark. In GT Legends, you’re convinced that Ralph Nader is the worst thing to happen to the automobile industry and privately wondering if you’ve got enough gas money to finish the race. In GTR, you’re convinced corporate mergers are the worst thing to happen to the automobile industry and privately wondering if you’ve got enough gas money to finish the race.

GTR

Gameplay

Both games offer annoyingly perfect attention to detail, but for some odd reason, GT Legends felt less sterile and had more soul than its cousin. The user interface felt easier to navigate as well and I found myself asking quite often, “Well, why doesn’t GTR do X this way?” It just felt like more work than fun.

In both games, you can tinker in the garage, messing with tire pressures, gear ratios and the like. Again, GT Legends’ method of doing this looked less messy and more functional than GTR. Another problem I had was that my mouse and keyboard would cease to function properly in GTR after a while and it made exercising these options more difficult than it should and no patching or driver updating seemed to help.

Until recently, that is. Last month, AMD came out with a neat little utility called a Dual-Core Optimizer. It completely cleared up all of the numerous control issues I was having with the game and made it a very playable title.

GTR

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