I finally decided to bite the bullet and get the platinum trophy for Gran Turismo 7! This was a long road, years in the making basically. To be honest though, all the hard work was done a long time ago, all I had to do was get one more trophy. Knowing my sensibilities though, it’s easy to understand that the very last trophy I had to get was for competing in 50 online races.
What made this really easy was using my PlayStation Portal to remote play races while watching movies and shows on the couch. I could easily line up two races in a row, and in 20 minutes they’d be knocked out. Online races in GT7 all start at specified times, usually about every 10 to 20 minutes with a little break in between the next session. It was actually really chill going through this and I did have some fun playing these races.
I wanted to have a very chill play of this game, without really stressing on getting the fastest qualifying laps, so I ended up only doing a qualifying lap once, and used that generic time for all my subsequent races at that track. This usually put me in the back third of the pack to start out with, and I would generally inch my way up as the race progressed. I wanted to really focus on being a good driver, not bumping other players and generally having a stress free experience. What ultimately stopped me from having that in most races was that the people I was playing against, at least in the back of the pack, were a bunch of assholes.
What I noticed about how the game handles giving out penalties to drivers is a point of contention with me. If you bump a player off the track, you get a good sized penalty, which sounds like a proper thing to do. The issue lies in how it feels to be the player that is getting bumped and the way other scenarios are handled. Two things would often happen. I would be in the lead and a lower “rank” player would be behind me. After a while I know full well what they are going to do, since it would happen in almost every race I did. They would break late and run into the back or side of my car, using me as a guide to keep them on track and to push me out of the way. If I know this is happening I can prepare and press hard on the break to keep me from going off the track, but messing up my turn and slowing me down, thereby letting the other player who rammed me to speed off into the distance without getting a penalty, because I didn’t go off the track. On the other hand, If I know they are going to hit me and I let go of the break and gas and just let them ram my car off the road, slamming me into the side and potentially turning my car around, they will get hit with a hefty time penalty and I will be stuck trying to turn my car around and get back on the track. Either way, I’m screwed. It’s not fair.
The best thing one could do is to focus on clean racing and moving up in the rating system to play with other people that don’t hand out penalties, which was hard to find at my low level. I did progress up and got to a nice ranking, showing the rest of the field that I was a “good” driver, but that did little to stop the harassment dished out by the riffraff.
I also kept up on my car collection, now only missing 2 of the cars in the nearly 500 car collection. I only missed an opportunity to buy these from not signing in the month they dropped, so I will have to wait for them to come back into the used car rotation. It’s a little thing that doesn’t really matter anymore I suppose.
My first platinum trophy for a Gran Turismo game and I must say that I am proud to have achieved it. The License tests, especially the last set of them, proved to be both difficult and rewarding in what they taught me about handling these cars in a video game form. I’ve been a fan of the series from the very first title and still own all my copies. I’m happy to see the free updates and content drops keep coming and can’t wait to see a nice PS5 Pro version come out one day.
Ghost Ba Bomb 