Overview
Here’s a quick lowdown on Tourist Trophy:
- TT is a ‘sister title’ of the Gran Turismo series. It’s developed by Polyphony Digital and uses the same graphics engine, gameplay setup and mostly the same tracks as GT 4.
- Currently TT is available in Asia and the USA. A European release is currently expected in late May.
- As with Gran Turismo you can tune your bikes to improve their performance at individual tracks. Options are however fairly limited compared to GT and you’ll generally just be choosing between stock/race exhaust, suspension setup and tyre type.
- There are three control modes: Standard, semi-pro and pro. In pro mode your front and rear brakes are operated independantly and it’s possible to spin up the rear wheel if you’re too hard on the throttle whilst leant over.
- As in GT a photo mode is available in which you can take action shots of your favourite bikes. You can choose from 64 different camera angles and set different apertures, shutter speeds, white balance and more. Once you’ve taken your shots you can save them to a USB stick and share them with your friends or on our Tourist Trophy forum.
- Unlike the GT series you can race a fairly wide selection of bikes in arcade mode right away, and there is no need to unlock the different circuits. In ‘Tourist Trophy mode’ you can unlock new bikes by completing license tests, completing ‘challenges’ (usually to overtake a similar bike in under X laps and stay ahead for 10 seconds) and by taking part in race series.
- Licenses do feature in TT but they’re not as big a part of the game as in the GT series. There are four license levels available, each with 8 seperate tests.
- Crashes finally feature in a Polyphony Digital game! It is possible to both highside and lowside your bike if you push things a bit too far and if you try to get your knee down on the grass it’s not likely to work. After a fall you are ‘reset’ more or less where you came off at low speed. If you have a big crash, eg head on into a wall at 150mph, then a 10 second penalty occurs during which you cannot accelerate.
- There is a maximum of four bikes per race. Polyphony say this is because the bikes take more processing power than the cars do in GT so it isn’t possible to have as many on screen at a time.