Meanwhile, "No Damage" is about trying to win a race without simply bullying other cars out of the way by messing up your paintwork.īut while these work and the "Challenge" theory is certainly sound, other areas fall down for the same reasons that everyone slags off Gran Turismo's licence tests. Keeping up your average speed over two laps is similarly engrossing. Project Gotham Racing fans will certainly understand. One recurring task involves snaking through cone gates before your time is up, and it's hard to resist the temptation to repeat this until you've claimed the gold medal. The best examples of this are fun rather than simply educational.
All the screen furniture is optional, and can be modified. The difficulty of picking up TOCA's handling isn't sufficient to warrant quite so many skill-building tasks, but the decision to chunkify the game does help you to learn the track layouts (crucial during races, obviously), and more pointedly aims to school you about racing lines, braking distances and so on. This does mean that your traditional dour Scottish mechanic is absent, but it (and indeed that) is not entirely without merit. New to the PSP's confusingly named second outing - and responsible for its longer title - is the World Challenge mode, which throws you onto tracks in various bits of the world with specific objectives, the idea being to develop your skills before it plunges you into qualifying and Grand Prix. Of course, some of that was there in the last handheld TOCA.
There's no shortage of viewpoints to opt for (bumper, bonnet, in-car, third-person), there's a rare outing for the game-sharing option (we'd forgotten how to use it, it's been so long), there's replay-saving and even custom soundtrack support. It's also symptomatic of TOCA Race Driver 3's devotion to its new home.
It is, as Kieron would probably point out, "very emo". This, I'm reliably informed, is how "the hardcore" play. This lets you use the analogue nub for acceleration and braking, while the PSP's face buttons act as a d-pad. You know what TOCA was clearly missing? An option to turn the screen upside down. Post-publication shouting: Attention! Sumo Digital made this game! We forgot to put that the first time! This is quite surprising as they also ported OutRun 2 and did OutRun 2006, which we usually mention at least once a day! Exclamation exclamation oneoneshift normal service resumes.