If you watch someone else playing GT3 for a while you will notice a hoard of nice little touches the developers have incorporated into the graphics engine. The player will experience sunstrike, gleaming chrome, relective glass, realistic shadowing, impressive light-sourcing and a rippling heat-haze. Another wonderful effect that is particularly striking are the wet road surfaces on a rain-soaked track, which contain remarkably realistic reflections along the tarmac. The Rally racing tracks contain their own little graphical gems, and have been heavily improved over the lacklustre tracks that were featured in Gran Turismo 2 for the PlayStation.

The game offers the player the choice of cars from many countries, including Japan, United States, Australia (no Holdens though, doh!), Germany, Italy, England, France and Belgium. Unfortunately the car count is far lower than what GT fans would have expected (around 180 cars) to allow each car to be an exact match of its real life counterpart. These cars boast some extremely realistic engine sounds, which all sound different with the variety of car models on offer. The sound effects are more balanced with the music this time round too, and you generally won't find one being drowned out by the other. The music itself consists of a number of songs by well-known recording artists from America as well as some tracks that have been kept from the Japanese version. The options menu also allows you to choose your favoured music so that you can bury those songs you don't like down the bottom of the playlist.

What many people will be most concerned about is how well the game plays. Needless to say, anyone who played and loved the first two Gran Turismo games will be right at home with GT3. There is an abundance of races to take part in, well over 60 including Rally courses and those ever-vigilant long distance endurance events. There's certainly plenty of gameplay to be had through the tournament options too, as each trophy must be won by competing in a number of races which each contain over 20 laps (don't worry you can save between races thank goodness!). Considering the money that can be won on the early races is not a great amount, you will no doubt find yourself up until the twilight hours of the morning attempting to save enough cash for that elusive high-end automobile of your dreams.