Gran Turismo 4

Somewhere in the used car lots of Polyphony Digital's fourth game sits an 1886 Daimler Motor Carriage, a two-cylinder curiosity that tops out somewhere around 10 mph and takes the better part of a minute to reach it. Nothing in the career requires you to buy it. It exists because the studio had decided that a driving game should be a museum as well as a sport, and once you accept that premise the rest of GT4's excesses start to make sense.

The car count ran past 700, spread across a century of manufacturing and organised into national and manufacturer showrooms that reward browsing more than shopping. The track list finally included the Nürburgring Nordschleife, and it is here that the game's real character shows: a single lap takes eight minutes, the surface never stops changing camber, and the physics model is patient enough to punish a lift at the wrong crest. Licence tests still gate progress, still demand you shave tenths off a braking marker, and still function as the best driving tutorial the console ever shipped. They are also where most players quit.

B-Spec is the strangest thing here and the most quietly influential. You hand a car to an AI driver, manage his pace and pit strategy from a timing screen, and fast-forward the race at up to triple speed. A racing simulator that lets you not drive should be absurd. In practice it made the 24-hour endurance events survivable, and it turned the back half of the career into something closer to team management than lap-chasing.

What has not aged is the presentation restraint. Photo Mode let you park a car in Kyoto or on the Amalfi coast and fuss over aperture, which was a peculiar thing to build into a PS2 game and a clear signal of where Polyphony's attention had drifted. The support for progressive scan and 1080i output pushed the hardware harder than almost anything else in the library. The trade-off was the AI, which drives to a rigid line and rarely fights you, so races are won on setup and consistency rather than wheel-to-wheel nerve. Online play, promised at various points, never arrived; LAN and split-screen were the extent of it.

It remains the most complete thing on the console for anyone who wants to learn a corner properly. Not the most exciting racer on PS2 — it is not trying to be — but the one that treats a slow lap as information rather than failure, and hands you a 118-year-old horseless carriage in case you needed proof that the point was never speed.