Total Immersion Racing Review

Total Immersion Racing is a bare-bones rendition of Gran Turismo 3 or Sega GT 2002, albeit without the preponderance of cars and special effects. What's left over is a driving simulation that offers the rich gameplay of these heavy hitters, as well as a graphical show that's nearly on par with them, but none of the frills or splash that would attract casual players in search of a vicarious speed rush. It's a game for people who want to discover what the weekly toil of GT-class competition is really like, who understand that actual racing often entails driving around the same course lap after lap without much fear of hazards or obstacles, and who don't mind that the ultimate reward is the ability to drive a handful of different cars for various teams on tracks located throughout the world.

It's like Gran Turismo, albeit without Seattle, Tokyo, and Rome.

In most respects, Total Immersion Racing is patterned after the majority of other racing simulations. You have a career mode that lets you bounce from team to team at the start of each racing season, a challenge mode where you race for bragging rights with specific vehicles or in specific leagues, and the typical assortment of time trial, single, and two-player split-screen races you've come to expect from this sort of game. Cars are separated into GT, GT-S, and prototype classes, but just like in real life, most races are grand events that include entrants from all three classes. This leads to a more exciting race, since faster cars are competing within their group while simultaneously avoiding the slower cars scattered around the racecourse.

For every championship you win or challenge you complete, you'll unlock an additional car or course to use in the other game modes. Like in the similarly designed Pro Race Drive, some teams will make you run a test drive before offering you a spot on their roster, which is a nice touch. You won't find 200-plus cars as you will in Gran Turismo 3, but the 15 vehicles that are included do represent the major players on the GT circuit, from teams such as Audi, BMW, Panoz, and McLaren. Course selection is decent as well, with 12 tracks covering a number of real-world venues, from Rockingham in the UK and Hockenheim in Germany, to Springfield in the US and Minato in Japan.

The overall controls and handling are good and are easily equal to what you'll find in other, more recognizable driving games. To get going, all you need to do is press the accelerator and remain near the center of the track, although you'll have to exert careful speed control and brake timing if you actually want to win the race. The cars don't have parking brakes, so in order to slide through turns you have to use quick brake-drift-gas maneuvers to sweep through turns at around 90mph. Sometimes, you'll have to slow down to 30mph in order to navigate sharp turns properly. Acceleration and brake response are superb, and the excessive precision afforded by the analog buttons on the Dual Shock 2 controller gives you a greater degree of control than you have in the corresponding Xbox version of the game.

Rain turns things ugly. Real ugly.

Even though there are only 15 available cars, there is a lot of variety in the way they each handle, thanks to variances in weight and transmission. You can also tweak handling settings in 22 categories. One of the game's more interesting features is its race engineer option. Basically, you can run practice laps and let the race engineer tweak your car based upon your driving behavior. It really works. You can feel the changes during each successive lap as the back end of your car spins less and less when you drift through high-speed corners.

While the driving is exquisite, you may take issue with the course selection. The 12 included tracks are re-creations of actual race venues, which means that they're not necessarily as thrilling as the fictional courses you'll find in other games. You won't encounter surprise obstacles, muddy bogs, or bridges set against waterfalls. There are plenty of chicanes, drops, and U-turns to keep things interesting, however, as well as a good mixture of day, dusk, dry, and wet race environments.