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By Keith B (12th Apr 2007)

As a threadbare undergraduate with a penchant for wine some years ago, I was often reduced to cruising booze-shop aisles in search of garish red sale signs next to wines of rather dubious quality. Sometimes I would luck out; at other times, well.... And then sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, I would buy a wine unlike and just like every other. It wasn’t bad or good, too sweet or too sour, too dry or too thin; it would taste, quite simply, like the beginnings of wine, lacking all characteristics that would distinguish it either positively or negatively from its peers. It was wine without being in anyway specific enough to deserve its own name or even a label. Hence the exceedingly generic title for maybe the most broadly humdrum Wii game so far: GT Pro Series. One might as well call it Speed Racing, Fast Cars or, more aptly, Driving Game. Worse still, GT Pro Series hardly qualifies as a Wii game, choosing to develop its own steering mechanism instead of actually employing the console’s ready-made motion-sensitive Wiimote.

GT Pro Series is an entirely standard racing game. Players start by racing shorter, less challenging courses. Soon you’ll be moving on to longer and more difficult tracks. Wins lead, as per usual, to the body shop, where you’ll pick up new cars and hotter parts to trick out existing rigs. The ten tracks themselves are pretty blasé, offering little in the way of diversity or even visual appeal. Worst of all, the game’s developers were lamely content to mirror the ten tracks (now suddenly twenty!) in reverse�"the most self-evidently lazy race-game designer ploy of them all.

GT Pro Series, like most driving games, forces you to concentrate on the road, though the reasons for that are somewhat less inspiring: in most driving games, players are so transfixed by the track’s heady action that they don’t have time to scan the lush digital landscapes; in GT Pro Series, the surroundings are so dull players will simply have nothing better to look at. And yet while the tracks offer little in the way of variety, the cars do. The game, which is often structured around league play, requires players to complete a series of courses, in sequence, during which certain targets�"speed, handling, etc�"must be fulfilled, and between which shorter, often grossly tutorial-like challenges must be successfully completed in order to gain licensing. Unfortunately, your first jalopy isn’t going to do the job on its own, so those individual course wins, and their consequent winnings, come in quite handy. Shockingly, the developers, while putting little effort in to invent a truly new-feeling game, have gone to unbeknownst cross-promotional commercial ends, licensing out some 80-plus models from nearly a dozen recognizable Asian auto manufacturers�"including Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, and Mitsubishi. The more skeptical will assume the top-brass car CEOs signed on the dotted line before seeing this dismal game, eventually shuddering all the way to the shareholders’ meeting with the tepid announcement of a forthcoming videogame tie-in.

The most disappointing feature of the game is its use of the Wiimote. Rather arbitrarily included with your purchase of this unfortunate game is a decidedly third-rate steering wheel attachment. This brackets around the Wiimote, forcing players to go from typical, silly Wii-player, to lame-ass attachment guy�"the type who would spend millions developing a gravity-defying ink pen to use in outerspace rather than just buying a readily available pencil. As a result, rather than just rocking the Wiimote back and forth while being held horizontally, you turn a free-floating steering wheel left to right without any sense of precision or stability. How on earth could anyone think that this is a good idea? The Wiimote�"that motion-sensitive, specially designed, super-revisionary controller that is the lone distinguishing feature between the Wii and the bevy of other more graphically minded next-gen consoles�"not be employed as it was intended? What makes the Wiimote so interesting is that it displaces while replicating the natural motions of a million add-ons and attachments: guns, golf clubs, footballs, skateboards, boxing gloves and�"yes!�"steering wheels shouldn’t and aren’t necessary. Maybe more shocking, though, is the fact that this seemingly arbitrary steering mechanism is the best feature of the game.

Gameplay is decent if not good. As per usual, GT Pro Series has found little consequence in massive car crashes and collisions. Maybe this is a good thing. The game regularly relies so heavily on drifting�"a feat of superhuman manual control when employed in tandem with that crummy plastic steering wheel�"that car crashes, while rarely hampering play, are simply unavoidable. As a result, collisions, while slowing you down, will never prevent you from completing a race. The multiplayer mode borders on abysmal: split-screen action tends to shrink the tracks to untenable sizes, while the challenges�"such as quick races and drift contests�"leave one less than enthralled, lacking the sort edge that puts them into innovation territory rather than just breaking up the game in manageable, less than fully thought-through ways. Even the five gameplay modes (championship, race, speed, head to head, and drift-combo), leave one rather cool, lacking characteristics that would make a player choose one willfully over another. Your competitors, an automated gaggle of failed videogame racers, generally have a pretty difficult time winning. With the slightest amount of practice, and just a few encounters with these numbskulls, you won’t only be winning races, but embarrassing your competitors, who have little beyond a few predictable blocking moves and the weakest engines in the game. It will be less of a victory for you, really, than the prevention of a loss.

Visually the game is painfully boxy and surprisingly pixelated. Rather than just going for the bubbly, anime-safe last-gen look, which the Wii is capable of, the game’s developer, MTO, has attempted a somewhat high-minded, vivid realism. Everything is supposed to be crisp, sharp and sleek; but the reality is that the game looks less like reality than was intended. As a result, the game looks sloppy, having overshot its capabilities worse than the “gifted” (in the words of his creative writing teacher) teenage short story writer who attempts a novel before his twentieth year. The effort is there, though neither the talent nor the ability. So here and there you’ll see a generic cityscape, the almost standard-issue race along a cliff-like incline, and the dimly lit night-tunnel course, all possibly imported from another long-forgotten racing game of yore. Little better can be said for the game’s soundscape: the squealing tires and revving engines seem like a last-second add-on, lacking the kind of ballsy gusto that fires the adrenaline. Likewise, to call the music generic would be to the insult of generic racing-game music producers everywhere; the music, in this case, is just plain bad.

While playing the game I couldn’t help but get the impression that GT was released by accident. When I think of the game being produced I imagine some shiny off-wing office at MTO. A bigwig enters holding a permanent marker-labeled disk which he promptly pops it into the in-house Wii. “This is a new program we’re trying,” he growls between big puffs of a cigar. “We get one group to develop the base game and another to make it into something special.” The development teams nods, looking blankly at the plain red car puttering along a grey road between two swaths of primary green. “Is that a Trabant?” an incredulous designer mutters to himself. Months later the head honcho returns and asks for the finalized game. Problem is, somewhere between laughing at its mediocre graphics and checking their email, the designers forgot to take the base and make it unique. “Uh, here it is,” the fire-eyed rookie proffers, handing the game back and picking up his dinner plate, “we also developed a steering wheel for it.” No one says anything and marketing never bothers to play the game, instead punching up some snappy, unrelated cover art and sending it to the printer. Months later it ends up at my local video store and I’m fool enough to give it a go. After about ten minutes of play I’m positive that either this isn’t a Wii game or that I’ve developed the gaming-selection palate of your average grandmother.

Plain and simple, the only place GT Pro Series is going to be racing is the sales bin.