as a change of pace from the other stuff i’ve been spending time on lately, i started a playthrough of gran turismo 4. the last time i played this game was about 9 years ago so i’m really looking forward to spending time with it again. lots of memories in here for me.
one of my favorite things about the game is its inclusion of a photo mode, so as i play through the game i’m going to post photos here.
it’s pretty cool, you have the ability to adjust the focal length and aperture and other options too and it all works as it should. i used to enjoy messing around with this when i was younger, but now with a couple of years of photography under my belt i get a lot more out of it.
there’s a “photo travel” mode where you set your car up in a scenic location and take pictures of it, and then there’s a mode where you can just take shots from a race replay. i’ll be doing both!
i started up simulation mode and went to buy my first car – i stopped by the cutely named “old timer” lot and bought a 1983 honda city turbo ii. kind of an impulse purchase, i would normally go with an mr2 or at least something with rwd as a first car but i wanted to try something different. plus, the city is a cute car!
i've still got some kinks to iron out in the photo process but it's a lot of fun and i'm looking forward to sharing more pictures as i make my way through the game.
Really enjoyed this. I had a lot of fun with photo mode in GT4. I also didn’t have much familiarity with the mechanics of photography at the time. I actually liked using it for virtual tourism in a way. I remember being fascinated with off-track details and how much you were able to see of the little electronic dioramas they put together. I’ve always had an appreciation for that kind of stuff, and the detail in some of the photo travel locations is pretty impressive for the time (shop signs in shibuya being filled in and readable). Many of my shots didn’t even have cars in them.
Anyway, I dug them up while writing this post. Here’s a few. My taste in cars wasn’t that great.
As someone who has played both for a longer time than necessary, GT3 feels a bit more “Blueskies”-esque than GT4.
Colors in 3 felt more vibrant than in 4, something that probably is down to the “realism”-claim that GT has adopted early on. This also shows in the design of the race tracks, if you’ve only known 4’s interpretation of classic GT-tracks, you’ll be surprised by 3’s offerings, because they are more arcade-esque - less tarmac-runoff-areas/less runoff-areas in general which means guardrails closer to the track and the tracks feel a bit more “flowing” than the more realistic interpretations of 4 onwards.
[quote=“yarusenai, post:1, topic:1312, full:true”]i’ve still got some kinks to iron out in the photo process but it’s a lot of fun and i’m looking forward to sharing more pictures as i make my way through the game.
hope ya liked it.[/quote]
I do, and am looking forward to your pictures!
(also loving rye’s architecture-pictures there, some interesting stuff there!)
I’ve spent quite some time with GT4-photo mode, though only started picking up some photographing-basics way afterwards … nevertheless, I still like some of the shots I’ve kept around till today, like this one:
I didn’t really play GT3 much, but @SONNICK is making me want to revisit it. Equally feeling an urge to fire up GT4 (in 1080i mode) and take more pictures.
in addition to what sonnick said, gt3’s physics engine feels different. i find that it’s different enough that it offers a different experience from gt4.
yes! myself as well. it is probably very obvious from the photos i posted but i’m less interested in “look at this sick car” and much more interested in “this is a car that i think looks cool and here it is as a part of the landscape”. that is a driving force behind the real photographs i take, and i’m very happy the environments in gt4 are fleshed out enough to make this a possibility.
thanks for sharing your photos too. :>
i’ll be playing and updating a little more tonight.
I love this. I always saw the Gran Turismo series as a game where you take great pleasure in enjoying the cars YOU LIKE, and see what you can do with them. I only ever got into high spec cars for a change from this. Aside from the endless number of skylines, the games in this series always had a hugely enjoyable number of supposedly average vehicles.
yes, this is something i love about it as well! gran turismo is taglined “the realy driving simulator” and i feel like that’s very appropriate, and also speaks to why i enjoy it more than the forza series. to be honest, i find driving high-spec cars around sanctioned racetracks to get bland pretty quickly – give me a game like gt4, though, where you can just enjoy driving a car around a variety of interesting environments and i’m having a great time!
and yeah, the skylines are a bit obnoxious – especially when they have 50 skylines but leave out nifty cars like the 1st-generation mazda rx-7 and the subaru xt
also, i swear there are just as many miatas as there are skylines! probably not, but there’s still a ton.
Yeah I remember playing this when it came out (in Argentina’s pirate market). I played with photo mode only a couple of times, and I saved two photos in the memcard thinking “how the hell will I take them out?”. A year or so later came the “chinese MP3 player” wave, and I used mine to take them out, the wonders of technology!
