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Fast forward to 2001. Gran Turismo 3 for the PS2 has been released in Japan and has already sold a million copies. One of the most anticipated PS2 titles is here, and Sports Gaming has secured a copy of the import version and is here to give our early impressions. So is GT3 revolutionary or evolutionary?

First off, let's get the graphics out of the way quick. Make no question about it, the game is beautiful. I could go on and on about every detail in the game but I won't. I'll just tell you it looks great. Cars have incredible detail, the frame rate blazes along and never skips a beat, the tracks look superb, and pop-up is found only when you take your eyes off the racing and look way, way down the track. A nice touch is that on rally tracks once you get off road the dirt kicks up. If you're behind, driving in the first-person view, the dust obstructs your vision. Speaking of views, the game offers two, a third-person bird's eye view and a first-person bumper camera. It's too bad the game couldn't have implemented an in-car camera like Driving Emotion (but that's the only thing from Driving Emotion I'd want to see in GT3). Graphically, if I were to make one complaint it would be the rear view mirror - it's too small in my opinion and losing advancing cars in the mirror is easy to do.

The audio is standard GT. Of course, the first thing I did was flip off the music so I could listen to the sounds of the road. I make no apologies for not delving into the music. The sounds of tires losing grip and engines revving is what I want. Fortunately you can drive in GT3 from the sounds alone. The audible clues let you know when you're on the limit of grip or when it's time to change gear. Driving over rumble strips sounds realistic as does the sound of driving over the dirt roads in rallies. The keen ear, however, can tell you that some of the engines don't sound like the real deal. Details.

Moving on to options, the game loads up with the ability to play in arcade or GT mode. The arcade mode is fairly deep with over 20 tracks at your disposal. The arcade mode can easily take hours to complete. But the real depth is the GT mode. I've spent over a dozen hours with the game in GT mode and am still just barely into the game. The game plays similarly to GT2 in that the game tracks the completion percentage of the racing. There are some five classes of racing with more than a dozen races or series per class.

Seeing as how the game is Japanese, I wasn't sure what to expect from the menus. While there is plenty of Japanese in the game, there are some English areas. Regardless, the menus appear to be easy to walk through, and the early indications are that the American release will have a similar ease-of-use. The car setup menus, while redesigned, will be familiar to veteran GT fans.

I'm sure readers to Sports Gaming care somewhat about graphics, sound, and options, but really you want to know how the game plays. I have to level with you first. My favorite gaming genre is racing. In fact, I just love racing in general. One of my highlights in the last year was when Speedvision showed up on the basic DirecTV package. I'm paying thirty clams a month and the channel rarely changes from 607. On the gaming front I'm a fan of both arcade and sim racers. Among my favorite games of all time I list Ferrari F355, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed 3, Tokyo Xtreme, and Monaco GP 2. So I was eager to put GT3 to the test.

Bear in mind that I'm a tough critic, especially of games regarded to be the best. They have to earn the Smith Stamp of Approval. I'd be willing to bet that once GT3 is released stateside, it will be rated artificially high since many reviewers will get caught up in the eye candy and won't spend an adequate enough time evaluating the physics and AI. While my impressions are nowhere complete, after some 20 or more hours of playing GT3 I certainly feel I can comment on the game's inner workings.

After playing the demo a few months back I was dismayed by the physics. Every car in the demo exhibited way too much understeer. After playing GT3 some, I realized that understeer could be controlled. In fact, the defaults in the arcade mode, in both drift and racing styles, revert back to front-wheel drive characteristics even when driving MR, FR, and 4WD cars. Luckily there's an option where you can adjust the spin and traction control to suit your driving style. This goes one step beyond what even F355 does with these options being on or off completely. GT3 allows you to make subtle changes to spin and traction control as well as turning them off completely. By turning the controls off you get a driving model more similar to the original GT. You can also spin out with ease if you're not careful. Thumbs up to Sony for at least letting us choose the driving difficulty ourselves.

The drift model really comes into play with the rally races. In the arcade mode, the rally racing is nothing short of incredible. Powersliding on the dirt tracks is a total rush. While the arcade rally racing is one-on-one, the action is intense. The rally engine is improved and it shows. The controller vibrates with every bump in the road, the AI is aggressive, and the handling is almost as good as Colin McRae. Due to the incredible depth of the game, I still haven't scratched the surface of the GT mode rally races.

Getting back to the GT mode, you'll find a game that will take many hours to complete. The game features the mundane license tests, and passing them with a bronze rating is easy for all but the S-class license. The license tests vary from straight line tests to sector runs to full laps. By earning additional licenses you increase the number of race series available to you. When you're ready to race, you get enough money to buy a low-end car. Even at the low end you can tell the handling difference between forward and rear wheel drive cars. Settling on the best FR car that I could buy I was off to the races.

After my first race I was amazed. The racing was great with the AI cars diving in at the corners trying to make passes. Unlike in the original GT, the AI cars didn't huddle up in a giant swarming pack and move around the course. Rather, they quickly spread out and lined up one behind the other in true road course racing fashion. They'd make logical passes when presented the opportunity and held their lines otherwise.

But as I upgraded my car and got more adept at the driving and such, I started to realize some problems. I have pinpointed two areas which prevent me from calling this game the best ever made - collision dynamics and driver AI. Now I love F355, but it's got horrendous collision dynamics too. GT3 is bad as well but in a different way. It just seems that Sony tossed out the rotational terms for collisions and consider only linear motion. Thus, if you hit or get hit on a rear quarter panel you won't have to worry about losing control. It's still early and I have yet to make it to the higher class racing (earning cash can take time in the game), but from what I've seen in the arcade and GT modes collisions with AI cars are handled unrealistically. The only time I was able to make a AI car lose grip was to broadside him. Even then the car simply translated; never did I perceive any rotational behavior of either my car or the AI car during a collision. Furthermore, you get some fairly quick stop and start motion with head-on collisions with walls, similar to Sega GT. And when hit from behind you can expect a Ridge Racer-like boost of speed.

The collision mechanics were accentuated when I was in some intense one-on-one racing with an AI car. He was coming up on my right so I moved over to block him. He wedged himself in the gap and proceeded to push his way forward as if I wasn't even there. Another time I purposely ran into a car at an angle and was dismayed when he didn't budge. About the only way to cause cars to slow down is to get in front of them and let them hit you from behind, which they do often.

Which brings into question the AI of the cars. Some races I'll get hit multiple times from behind. Real racers are smart enough to slow down to avoid accidents. Even when I'm behind an AI car and slow down to the same speed I'll occasionally get whacked from behind. Perhaps the worst AI feature is the lack of realistic driving patterns when you are either in first place or last place. The game has inherent catch-up logic that keeps the racing close. But I'd much rather win or lose on my own merits than for the game to handicap the field. As a point, I completed a race at the test track where I won by a few seconds and with a total time of around four minutes. I repeated the race and sat at the start line for two minutes. As the field went around the track they got slower and slower. At the two minute mark I hit the gas and was on my way, making up about 10 seconds at each sector. I ended up losing by 30 seconds or so, meaning I gained 90 seconds on the field. If the racing were true, I should have blown my competition away by 90 seconds on the first race.

The control with the standard Dual Shock 2 controller is very good. I remember going out to buy an Interact V3 wheel for the original GT which made the driving much easier. But the DS2 does a great job with pinpoint control. The rumble features are also well implemented. The game supports the analog buttons, but in reality you don't have the necessary throw on the buttons to make them worthwhile when driving.

I'm sure very little will change between the Japanese and American releases aside from the menus. Many will hail this title as the best racing title ever created. In some respects it is. The depth is incredible, and if you stick with it you are guaranteed at least 100 hours of play. The physics of your car while solo are very nice. It's only when you add AI cars into the mix that the game breaks down. The AI cars bully their way around the course and the game resembles bumper cars at times. I can't complain too much about the collision dynamics as contact modeling and the subsequent rigid or flex-body dynamics is not easy to implement in real time. But I will complain some. EA's NASCAR 2001 has a realistic collision physics engine, so why can't GT3? Fortunately, the good outweighs the bad with the title. The arcade-racing mode is intense, and the rally tracks serve up some of the best racing this side of Colin McRae. In fact, all the tracks have a good design and offer varying amounts of challenge. The GT mode is insanely long and well worth the 50 dollars you'll spend on the game when it comes out. And yes, the graphics are impressive.