While Sports Car GT offers a fair road-racing experience, the thought that Need for Speed: High Stakes and Gran Turismo are better by leaps and bounds never leaves your mind. With a limited array of options and modes, Sports Car GT really misses the mark.
The game features nine real cars, including the BMW M3, Porsche 911, Saleen Mustang, Callaway C7 and C12, and the Mosler Raptor. The cars are all decked out with authentic racing colors and spoilers just like the real road-racing rigs. There are ten tracks in all, each of them modeled after its real life counterpart. Some of the tracks include Road Atlanta, Laguna Seca Raceway, Lime Rock, and North Point. The game can be played from three different camera views: a standard chase view, a closer chase view, and a first-person bumper view.
The game only has three single-player modes to choose from. In season mode, you compete for money and season standings. The more you win, the more upgrades you can buy for better performance. In arcade mode you can jump right in and pick any car and track. Time trial mode, of course, lets you try to better your time for a particular track that you've already completed. There are a couple of two-player split-screen modes that let you and a friend compete. One is the standard head-to-head that has you and a second player on a track racing each other. The second is pace car mode, which throws one computer car into the mix. The final two-player option is pink-slip mode, which is done up in the same way as the high stakes mode in NFS: High Stakes. It lets you and a friend race against each other using the customized cars you built up from the one-player game. The catch is that the winner of the race wins the loser's car.
The game controls well when you use the analog controller, but the power slide is a little tricky at first. It doesn't feel as responsive as Gran Turismo, but it does have that simulation feel to its gameplay. The AI of the computer-controlled drone cars on the track is pretty weak. All of the cars seem to follow the same racing line except for the two that are always way ahead of the pack. This setup is nice when you are trying to learn how to play, since one of the cars is bound to be going about your speed. But once you get the hang of the controls it justturns into a battle for first, second, or third. This racing tale gets old, since you know how it's going to end even before it begins.
In the graphics department the game has some pretty major problems. The first problem is the game's overall drab appearance. It's almost as if every single race is done on an overcast day. Some of the lighting effects used in the game look nice, although the constant camera flare effect that shows up when you are racing some courses at night is just plain annoying. The barrier walls that are designed to keep you on track for some of the courses look nearly identical, in texture and color, to the road. Needless to say, this makes racing some courses extremely frustrating, because unless you're keeping a close eye on the map, you'll plow right into one of walls without ever seeing it. When this happens, or when you get all haywire and spin around and go head-on with one of computer-controlled cars, you'll notice the game's major factual inaccuracy. The cars don't flip, roll, or do anything other than come to a complete stop when you smash into something. These minor flaws take away from the game's realism and make it less fun to play.
The sound and music are also really poor. The race car's sound is more like a jet's turbine engine than a high-performance racing engine. This combined with the lame techno music makes the audio portion of Sports Car GT quite a flop.
In the end, Sports Car GT is an unpolished racing game that doesn't have anything new to offer in any department. So unless you're fiending for any new racing game you can get your hot little hands on, leave this one on the shelf.
