GT 64: Championship Edition

The Good
What do I like about this game? It was free. It came with my new Nintendo 64 which I had to buy after my last one was water damaged.

If I was to be generous GT 64 has a relatively inoffensive front end with a decent menu. The basic foundation of racing is satisfying enough for about 10 minutes and the illusion of sunlight on your car, buildings and the road is fairly competent.

The Bad
In all honesty GT 64 isn't bad in the way Superman or Bubsy 3D are bad in the sense that it doesn't border on being an unplayable blasphemy in a cartridge. No, it's bad because Imagineer are hacks who don't bat an eyelid at releasing a rushed, unfinished game and whose credits include Hanafuda and Seifuku Densetsu Pretty Fighter. So yeah, they're not great.

GT 64 just feels unfinished and hollow.

The actual driving model is atrociously basic. The physics are laughable. Calling them first generation would be an insult to first generation driving games on the Nintendo 64. You lose barely any speed when crashing into a wall and rival racers bumping into you seems to lack any sort of tangible consequence. Merely tapping the control stick left or right causes your car to fish tail like a garbage truck with two flat front tires.

When you're not marvelling at how basic and inconsistent the driving model is you can be bored to tears by the progression the game offers. Having only 3 tracks with a long and short variation of each you'd assume the game would be short wouldn't you?.

Well, it isn't.

It isn't because in order to race you have to qualify every single time you progress to the next round meaning you have to run three laps before you have to run another three laps to actually race. If the game was actually fun this wouldn't be such a big deal, but it isn't, so it is a big deal. Having to repeatedly drive solo over and over again through Blur Town becomes really tedious very quickly. There is nothing interesting to look at and you clearly won't be enjoying the experience of driving your Imagineer branded garbage truck through the rigidly geometric turns of this ugly, creatively bereft faecal deposit.

All of this negativity and I haven't even gotten onto the topic of the graphics of GT 64. Well, what can I say? They suck. Not only does the game run at a brisk 12 or so frames per second under circumstances where you're the only one driving but when there are more than 2 cars in your general vicinity it dips even lower. What is causing the frame rate dips?. There is virtually no detail in the environments. Occasionally a few boxes which are meant to be buildings pop up in front of you and then disappear almost immediately after you drive away from them. Texture detail on roads, buildings and cars is really, really poor. Textures are stretched, blotchy messes of ill defined origin. Trees look like big, green lollipops and bushes are pretty much the same. To make matters worse there is fog everywhere and according to Imagineer weather effects are tantamount to applying even more fog.

Sound?.

There are some hideous midis that play during the menu screens and nothing while you're racing. Your car makes some nice, albeit heavily compressed noise however when you brake it sounds like someone is shredding paper. There is also a crowd noise that plays when you get near the badly rendered stands however all you can really make out is what sounds like someone rustling a brown paper bag and this one guy gargling water. It's atrocious.

Is there replay value? Who cares? I don't know why you'd sit through the entire thing to begin with.

The Bottom Line
GT 64 has virtually no redeeming features. It's a game that seems rushed, unfinished and it's pathetic that it is all too familiar to the equally uninspired and depressing MRC that preceded it. No wait, I take that back. MRC had at least a tiny amount of imagination invested into the game design with the on road/off road dynamic.

GT 64 is nothing more than a by the numbers racer that doesn't even succeed in meeting the status quo. It's a racer that doesn't even get the racing part right. There is no sensation of speed due to the hideous frame rate and every car controls like an incessantly fish tailing garbage truck. The graphics are vomit inducing mashings of blocks and ultra low resolution textures plastered onto low polygon models of bridges and what I think is meant to be a castle but could be a big, medieval themed restaurant that got dropped into the Europe stage.

I don't like this game at all. There is no reason to like it. Some games that get derided have at least one or two redeeming qualities that save them from being complete and utter write off's. If you pay money for this game however, you are wasting it. There is nothing redeeming here, there is no silver lining. GT 64 is a boring, rushed and uninspired racer that fails to do anything it sets out to do.

Nice one Imagineer.