The Grand Tour Game has a poo-ometer
Expect toilet humour
THE FORTHCOMING Grand Tour video game includes a section in which excursions from a racing circuit reduce your “poo score”, according to car community website DriveTribe.
In a sponsored article on the site, which is backed by the presenters of The Grand Tour, Jeremy Clarkson James May and Richard Hammond, writer Tim Rodie says:
“The demo I played involved threading the a [sic] hypercar around the Algarve circuit used in S1E1 of the show. This section riffs on Hammond’s infamous shout of ‘There’s poo coming out’, and every time you leave the track your poo count goes down. Keep the car on the tarmac and you’ll maintain a better poo score. Obviously.”
Rodie echoed other articles in saying that the Grand Tour game is aimed to a great extent at those with only a passing interest in gaming; people who wouldn’t classify themselves as die-hard racing game fans.
It achieves this through liberal use the kind of off-the-wall humour found in the show, of which the “poo score” is one example. Another is the use of a medal system by which poor performances on track result in the awarding of virtual toilets, although receiving these won’t slow your progress through the game.
Another way the Grand Tour game will stand out from more serious racing games, such as the Gran Turismo, Forza and Project Cars franchises, is by the use of an episodic level system. New challenges and cars are reported to be released in conjunction with the airing of episodes of the show on Amazon Prime Video, with each section bookended with footage from the show.
And thanks to the employ of the developers behind arcade-style games Burnout and Need for Speed, the gameplay will be markedly less sim-focused than the dedicated racing games mentioned above. According to one reviewer of a pre-release demo, “At times, the game felt more like Mario Kart than Driveclub.”
Except it’ll be Mario Kart with Jeremy Clarkson; potentially four Clarksons, in fact, as Rodie says that in four-player split-screen mode, you and three friends will all be able to choose the Sunday Times Driving columnist. We’re going to need more poweerrrrrr!
