7) GT Sport
Platforms: PS4
Release Date: Sometime in 2017
The masters of pixel perfection — Polyphony Digital — are back in 2017 with GT Sport.
Every entry in Yamauchi’s fabled franchise is like a painstakingly constructed showroom of the world’s greatest cars. The showrooms are made from hand, of course, using only imported materials, and the cars have been washed in gold and butter and shined to perfection.
GT games are always about the cars first — everything else is secondary. To give you an example: 2013’s Gran Turismo 6 featured over 1,000 of them. I mean, really. All racing games like their rides but the GT brand is obsessed with them. In the recent past, though, that hasn’t always been enough — and with the increasing might of Microsoft’s Forza, Gran Turismo has lost a bit of its prestige.
Now, Polyphony are back to take control of the podium and the goal for this year’s entry is to pare back the excess and focus on quality, not quantity. The roster of cars for GT Sport has been pared back significantly, with only 140 specimens on offer this time (oh, what am I going to drive?!), each rendered in gleaming detail, right down to the individual nuts and bolts. There are also a scheduled 19 tracks. Clearly the goal is to go back to what made Gran Turismo famous: pure motoring perfection, rather than the obsessive excess that became something of a running joke.
The definitive racing game doesn’t yet exist on the PS4, but this might be it.
