Last night I passed the magic 25% completion mark in Gran Turismo 4. Besides rewarding me with a nifty new Audi, that unlocks one of the restricted areas: the endurance races.
Normally, races in GT4 last between two to ten minutes (and cover roughly the same number of miles), over one to five laps, depending on the track and race series. A series is usually composed of a set of races on different tracks, but you do the races one at a time and can save the game, retune or switch cars, etc. between them.
Not so for the endurance races. They usually last from two to four hours, non-stop, either by going for some extremely high number of laps, or or for a fixed amount of time (in hours) and measuring distance travelled. You can’t save during them, so if you stop, you have to start over from the beginning again. You can pause the game, but that’s all. It’s not really that bad though; instead of spending an afternoon on a bunch of races, you just spend it on that one.
But, that’s not all. New in GT4 are three 24-hour endurance races, modelled after the real-life 24-hour races of Le Mans and the Nürburgring. The prize cars for winning these races are among the best in the whole game. And, of course, they work under that same restriction: no saving.
Who in their right mind would play a single race for 24 hours of real time? Well, nobody, really, which is probably why they introduced the B-spec mode in GT4. You can enable it and have the AI drive the car for you. Start the race, go away, come back later, and you’ll (hopefully) have won the race and received the prize car. It even has a triple-speed time compression feature to reduce the total running time down to 8 hours. B-spec mode is considered by many to be a rather cheap way to win most races, but an exception is made for the endurance races since people have better things to do with their time.
Except I don’t. This almost certainly makes me crazy, but I’m tempted to give the 24-hour Nürburgring race a try. (Not all three, though. I’m crazy, not insane.) Why? JUST ‘CAUSE.
I certainly wouldn’t want to try doing all 24 hours in one shot, though; I’d want to split it up over several days. Since you can’t save during the race, that would mean leaving the PS2 on continuously and hoping it doesn’t overheat or lose power. I’d also have to get some practice and test laps to first confirm that I’m actually good enough to win the race — there’s no point in running it if I’m only going to wind up in fourth place, after all.
And, if I do this, maybe it’s about time I finally picked up a proper driving wheel controller. The standard DualShock controller works, but a wheel would feel more natural of course, and the finer control might be necessary for the other more difficult races to come (I reached 25% mostly by running through the easier ones). And I recently picked up GTR for the PC, and it’s nearly impossible to play with the keyboard.