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Racing games are a bit of a special interest for me, I'm always hungry for more classic car racing titles. Sega GT was, as the title suggests, Sega's attempt at competing with Gran Turismo, back in the year 2000. Originally released for the Dreamcast, and ported to Windows PCs a year later. Was it any good? (probably not, because basically nobody's heard of the game since then, but you never know...)
Speaking, again, as a fan of such games, I thought Sega GT was really charming. But it was seriously lacking in content, only a few dozen cars compared to GT2's monstruous 600+ roster, and a lot smaller than even the more modest GT3's line-up. It also suffers from the issue that a lot of similar racing games have, where most of the cars will be roughly in the same class (Civics, Skylines, Evos, what have you), but then they'll include one car that just completely overpowers the rest (in this case, the Dodge Viper which you see in the cover art). Although of course, part of the fun of racing games is the ability to choose your own difficulty by choosing your own cars, and I was focused more on driving a variety of cars rather than just beating the game as quick as possible.
The unique selling point of this particular game is the so-called Carrozerria, which lets you assemble your own car model, by specifying things like engine displacement, drivetrain layout, and then picking one of a few exteriors. Looking at the choice of exteriors, you may realize that this may have been just Sega's way of sneaking in some car models that they could not properly license for the game - the fictional car bodies closely resemble those of e.g. the Corvette C3, the Caterham Seven, and other fun models. The problem is that, more often than not, the custom cars end up being horribly tuned and really un-fun to drive. But, with enough money, you can make their engines extremely powerful (though even then you may have trouble competing with a plain ol' Viper).
The music was also really good, being a Sega game.
The game has its strengths, but the lack of content and mediocre driving physics make it overall a bit difficult for me to recommend even as a fun of that era of racers. *7/10*
The game is old, and likely due to licensing issues which are typical for racing games, has not been updated or sold since 2000, so it is a pain in the butt to run on modern systems. You'd probably be better off emulating the Dreamcast version. But, I made a whole write-up for getting the Windows version of the game to run in Linux, if anybody's interested. In case the WineHQ website dies some day, I'll just copy-paste it here.
Copied from my WineHQ App Database report
What does not work:
Game uses a CD check, won't run if you just execute the .exe.
Game displays black screen for me unless I enable "virtual desktop" in winecfg.
With default installation, car sounds don't play (though all other sounds and music play properly).
Intro cutscenes don't play.
Workarounds:
To get around CD check: if you install the game from disk images (via CDemu or fuseiso or whatever), make sure to go to winecfg -> Drives -> add D:/ drive, pointing to the "Play" CD image mount point. Make sure to select Additional Settings and mark the D:/ drive as "type: CD-ROM".
While you're in winecfg, make sure to enable virtual desktop, to avoid a black screen issue.
To fix car sounds, install "winetricks dmime".
You can press spacebar to skip the broken intro videos, but my preferred workaround is to just get rid of the cutscene files. Remove "Activision.avi" and "SegaGT.avi" from the game installation directory.
Additional comments:
To upscale the resolution:
Install "winetricks dxvk", this is necessary for dgVoodoo2 to run.
Install dgVoodoo2, move the DLLs from MS/x86/*.dll to the game's installation folder.
Run winecfg and add the moved dlls to the library overrides list.
Run "wine dgVoodooCpl.exe". There you can change the resolution, force fullscreen and change aspect ratio, enable anti-aliasing and texture filtering, etc. The menu textures might look a bit broken with this, but the gameplay will look much better.
To let the game run at 60 FPS, you can try following PCGamingWiki's guide on how to hex edit SegaGT.exe, but for me personally that didn't seem to work.
gardenapple - 2024-02-29