My First Impressions of Gran Turismo 7 Beta

Mazda uses Gran Turismo as a platform to show their dedication to rotary-powered cars by committing to only create them in video games.

If you are a car enthusiast and a gamer, chances are you will have heard about the Sony PS5 launch that just happened last week. With it, of course, is the much awaited announcement of the racing simulator, Gran Turismo 7.

It is a big deal, of course. The Gran Turismo series is one of the most realistic driving games available today, featuring a huge array of cars and stunning photo-realistic graphics that would surely push the Playstation hardware to the edge. It is an exciting time for a long-time Gran Turismo fan like myself.

It just so happens that one of my cousins is a beta-tester at Polyphony Digital, and I have been able to get my hands on a pre-production PS5 and a secret beta copy of GT7.

With a massive release like this, there are many things that Polyphony Digital are trying to improve over the previous titles, while coming up with new content to keep the series fresh. This game being still in beta stages however means that there are some glitches and bugs as well.

Here are some of the things that I have observed while playing this game.

Pretty proud of this.

A Quick Praise on Need For Speed: High Stakes.

Got pretty bored on Gran Turismo Sport so I used their excellent scapes mode and created this. Pretty proud of this effort, so I am going to create the rest pretty soon.

Remember back when the Need for Speed series was about sports cars and police chases? Those were the days. And then Fast and Furious happened and now they are all about urban street racing. Not exactly complaining, I guess, as they will never be able to compete against the race simulators like GT or Forza.

Back when I was still in elementary school though, the game was mind-blowing. The cars were great. You can see into the interior. There's traffic and police. The music was rad too. My particular favourite was, of course, Need for Speed: High Stakes. You can even play as a cop and chase the racers down -- with regional police vehicles and radio communication in their respective languages. There was even a damage model for vehicles -- for a PC game from 1999! The level of detail was quite mind blowing.

The graphics may not be great by today's standards, but they did look great to my eye as a 10-year-old, playing on my sister's Windows 98 desktop.

The game also featured one of the coolest opening intro for a car racing game.

A Porsche 993 Turbo racing against a Honda Civic, which embarrassingly stalls at the light. Also features a Diablo and a C5 Corvette. Man, the 90s had great sports cars.