GT4 Released in US Today 2-23 (PS2)

Yay! My fiance is picking up his version of GT4 today! I hope he'll let me drive his virtual Prius, just as I let him drive my real one .

 

If you change the transmission, The CVT goes away and you have a standard transmission. I liked how they even included a MFD showing what's powering what.

Did any one else find it a bit strange that they stuck a '04/'05 body on a '03 car?

 

You know what else is interesting? Try to run the battery down lower than three bars. I can't seem to do it. (Run it on the test oval, and constantly accelerate until the arrow from the battery goes away, and then brake hard to a complete stop, then repeat) Once the battery gets down that low, I get a green charging arrow instead of yellow discharging arrow, even under hard acceleration. I don't even notice a difference in acceleration while it's in this charge-battery-at-all-costs mode.

So in a real Prius (which I have not yet driven) I imagine the battery would be pretty low after accelerating up to 120; in the in-game Prius you just lose a small fraction of the battery once you get up to speed, and deliberate attempts to drain the battery don't work.

(Maybe they didn't want to show people what happens when the battery gets low, so power to recharge the battery just magically appears...)

--Spence

 

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I have not played the game but I drive a Prius and I assure you that the battery doesn't drain pretty low after accelerating up to (but not quite) 120.

Drive up a mountain for half an hour. THEN we can talk about a drained (PINK!) battery.

 

Not to turn this into a "dog person" thread, but:

I just bought that Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel to go with my GT4 last night.

We also have a white German Shepherd (named Blizzard). He's an inside dog, well-domesticated. We haven't had to dog-proof the house at all.

It seems the dog is not compatible with the wheel.

We already know the dog reacts badly to anything motorized. Motorized things seem to be unwelcome living creatures in his view of the world, and he tries his best to repel them when they attack his household. Radio-controlled cars were fun until he grew big enough to damage the car when he caught it. Vacuum cleaners drive him mad, too -- he'll leave slobber all over the top of the base of an upright vacuum cleaner, because as you're pushing and pulling the vacuum he's trying to bite or chew on the slick plastic top of the vacuum, barking madly. His teeth never seem to catch on anything, so he ends up looking like he's trying to untie a knot with his teeth. It's pretty funny -- he's a dustmop attachment for our vacuum.

My better judgement stops me from buying an Aibo. (A Sony Aibo is an expensive toy for adults: it's a robotic dog which costs several hundred dollars. They're expensive and fragile, and even look like four-legged animals.)

I wasn't thinking about that reaction when I bought that wheel, though. When you bolt the wheel to a table and turn the wheel by hand, you can hear gears and at least one motor being driven. It sounds very mechanical, and that got the dog's attention right away. He came over to investigate, and licked at the wheel's housing.

Then I plugged the wheel in. When GT4 started up it recognized the wheel and initialized it. I've never seen this behavior before: when the wheel initializes, under its own power it turns all the way to the left (1 1/4 complete rotations), then back to center, then all the way to the right (1 1/4 rotations again), then back to center. It does a little more clicking and spinning as it calibrates itself, and then finally returns to center and stops.

Blizzard did not like that spinning one bit. He actually tried to bite the wheel! His gums were back, teeth bared, his head was tilted sideways, and by the time my hand reached his chest to push him away he had his jaws around the wheel and was about to bite down. "No, Blizzard! Quit that!" He's usually very good about not messing with our things, but maybe the rubber coating on the wheel made him think chewing on the wheel would be acceptable. Nearly everything else in the house made of rubber is a chew toy.

When I finally got the wheel and pedals arranged how I liked, and tried to play the game with them, he still seemed to feel like he had to protect me from the wheel. He laid down under my legs, chewing on a flattened all-rubber fake basketball. I think that wheel was stimulating something in him, and he was chewing to relieve that stress. On long straights he'd stop chewing and just kinda look at me, but the more I turned the wheel, and the higher-pitched the sounds that the wheel made were, the more frantic his chewing got.

After two or three hours of racing I think he's finally been conditioned to stop being aggressive with the wheel, but something about the wheel really bugs him. If he's laying on the floor on the other side of the room and I reach over and crank the steering wheel back and forth a few times, he immediately sits up and looks at it.

His behavior makes me curious: do things like RC cars and vacuum cleaners, and also this force feedback steering wheel, emit some kind of noise that irritates dogs or causes them pain? Or is it purely psychological, and he's showing his obsession with keeping us safe from dangerous mechanical invaders?

Either way... if you have a dog and buy a force feedback wheel to go with your GT4, watch for this reaction.

I highly recommend the wheel, by the way. The 900 degree wheel travel makes things very intuitive. I recommend setting wheel controls to simulation mode and doing some slow, conservative laps in an extremely underpowered car (like that 1985 Honda Today). Tricky turns in a 600 horsepower beast won't feel natural to anybody, because none of us drive like that in real life. Start with a slow car and take it easy, and you'll start to see your real-vehicle driving instincts apply themselves in the game. Then suddenly the wheel stops being a gimmick and starts giving you more control over your vehicle.

(Yes, I used to laugh at the idea of buying steering wheels for game consoles, picturing a cheap wheel with a "rumble pack" bolted on. I'm not laughing any more. So far this wheel is everything I would have wanted.)

Redo all of your license tests with the new hardware, also. You'll need the practice.

Sorry this was so long -- enjoy your game!

--Michael Spencer

 

Well, day 2 with the wheel. The dog seems to have calmed down. He still pays attention though, and seems to want to supervise the wheel so it doesn't bite me.

Since people are curious about the wheel, I'll talk more about that.

One small annoyance with the force feedback is that it seems to induce feedback loops when you're trying to straighten yourself out. I'll explain:

Suppose you're driving in a normal production vehicle, with proper (comfortable) suspension underneath. You just finish a hard turn around a corner, pushing the car nearly to its limits. The car will be leaning hard to the outside of the turn. You then exit the corner and straighten out. Different things happen depending on if you're controlling with a controller or a wheel:

With a controller, you just remove pressure from the thumbstick, and the game observes that you want to go straight now. You straighten out pretty quickly.

With this force feedback wheel, since one side of the car is still compressed, even when you want to go straight the car tries to keep turning the wheel, until the springs decompress. If you don't compensate for that, you'll end up turning toward the outside of the turn (which could take you off the track if you're running precise lines through the turns like the lessons teach you). You then have to turn the car back the other way, which puts you back on track but makes the body sway the other way again.

So you end up in this feedback loop, steering wheel input --> body sway --> steering wheel feedback --> corrective steering wheel input --> body sway --> steering wheel feedback, etc.

(That's not really the wheel's fault, so much as it's my fault for setting the wheel to 'simulation' mode. I guess I got what I asked for. It still doesn't seem fair though -- in a real car I'd be able to feel the body sway and I'd compensate automatically. In the game I just have a lateral-force indicator at the bottom of the screen, and that takes effort to look at.)

I drive a 94 Mercury Sable GS Sedan (like a Ford Taurus) in real life (my last car before I eventually buy a Prius ), and found the 98 Ford Taurus SHO in the game *extremely* fun to drive. The wheel did exactly what I thought it would do: transfer my real-life driving experience into the game. Lane centering quickly became automatic, and down straightaways I found myself resting my right hand on the couch armrest and driving with my left hand on top of the wheel, like in real life. I even turned off TC and VSC, since my real life car doesn't have them either, and still did OK.

Well, mostly OK. My own car has never been over 80 MPH, so I wasn't expecting the fun and excitement that awaited me at 130 MPH in the game. Apparently if you're going at your top speed, wait until the last minute before a turn, apply maximum braking power and try to skid to a stop, and then one wheel goes up onto the curb... and if you have no VSC to save you... the car doesn't point forward any more. I kinda went bouncing off the walls.

Actually, that's where that 900 degree range of motion really helps. It would have been very annoying to turn the wheel a half turn and hit a stop, while going 5 MPH and trying to get back on the road turned the right way. With this wheel the motions were just like the real thing: I instinctively spun the wheel a quick full turn and a half (nearly) to the left, to get back on the road, and kept turning -- and the wheel stopped right about where it would have on my own car.

I guess the downside to that is, to go from a quick left to a quick right, you have a lot of turning to do. Just like one of those parking lot maneuvers -- you have to spin the wheel around quick.

I guess here's the bottom line: this wheel seems to let you go through the motions of driving, and the game works with the wheel, both doing a good job of letting your real-life driving skill transfer over into the game.

If the game is all about learning to drive fast cars precisely, I think the steering wheel changes the game so you're learning with the correct part of your brain.

I'm going to force an analogy, since I studied this language: suppose you're learning Japanese. Part of the language is the weird written stuff. Suppose you're using this computer study program to help you learn kanji, which is just mind-numbing rote memorization. The computer program doesn't have you draw characters, though, it makes you drag and drop individual pen strokes into place. So you play that game for hundreds of hours, learning vast numbers of kanji, quickly approaching junior high school literacy.

Then someone hands you a pen. You find you can't write what you learned, because to make the computer program happy you never had to learn how to draw these shapes, just how to find them and drag-and-drop them into place. The program has helped you learn, but that learning is pigeonholed into a part of your brain you can't access very well when you need to.

I think this steering wheel affects GT4 in the same way. Some things that were easy with the controller get harder with the steering wheel. Many more things that were hard with the controller become automatic with the steering wheel. But because the driving maneuvers you're learning must now touch the same kind of "motor skills learning" that you use to drive yourself to work every day, I think the lessons the game teaches you are given more real-world context. When the game shows you that you're doing something wrong, you don't think about the thing you did wrong in terms of "what controller inputs to I provide at what time", you instead think about what you're making the car do, and what you should do differently -- and the necessary accelerator/brake/wheel input changes happen because you understand what you're changing and why it works, not because you're delaying a button press another quarter second later.

Nobody is suggesting you actually take this learning and go race the family car with it, but after my second day with the wheel I found it's a very different, more enjoyable experience playing the game with this wheel. Force feedback can be a little unnatural at times, and you don't feel any lateral forces on your body when your car is feeling them... but the wheel does a good job of maintaining your suspension-of-disbelief long enough for your natural driving instincts to do their job when they're called for.

(Also, I recommend a TV tray for mounting the wheel. Stick a half-inch-thick phonebook on the TV tray and clamp down, and sit yourself on the couch. I would've thought a TV tray would tip over far too easily, but I never had that problem. Even when doing violent steering-wheel-spinning hand-over-hand parking lot type maneuvering, the wobbly TV tray never caused a problem.)

I'm certainly no writer, and the skills of a good writer are definitely needed to get some of these ideas across. If I just rambled and nothing made sense here, it's my fault, not yours. I should learn to describe things better.

--Michael Spencer

 

Getting a car wash will also reduce the drag