A little surprise popped up in today’s (also surprisingly) wholesome European PSN update in the form of a GTi Club+ and, with myself suffering some serious writer’s block – did you not notice that SG no longer had 50 million articles a day – I figured writing about it could be the perfect cure, or at least a temporary antidote.

It sorta worked, since we have an article here, but it’s not particularly wholesome. Why’s that then? A quick verdict on GTi Club+ awaits after the jump.

You may have become accustomed to my articles featuring a backstory (if you’ve paid any attention to them whatsoever then congratulations, you have my respect) so here it is in abridged form. Blame the writer’s block.

GTi Club was an arcade racing game made by Konami back in the mid 90s. Set in a miscellaneous mesh of various parts of the South of France, you’d tootle around in all manner of sprightly small cars such as the old Mini Cooper or scrappy Renault 5s, racing through closed circuits or playing Bomb Tag across the free-roaming town (crash into someone to pass the Bomb on; you lose if it blows up when you’ve got it). It was cheap and cheerful, hardly boundary-pushing but a bundle of fun all the same. Until you ran out of time anyway.

For the 2008 generation of gamers who’ve probably never heard of GTi Club, Konami have handed the game over to Sumo Digital (behind the awesome Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast and, um, Super Rub’a'Dub). Sumo have taken the old, wheezy licence into the garage, given it a high-def lick of paint, thrown some networking features under the bonnet and stuck a “Plus” badge onto the back of it. At the end of all that, GTi Club+ rolls out of the showroom and onto the PSN next week. (That’s enough car metaphors now.)

GTi Club+ plays very much to what you’d expect if you’d taken the arcade original for a spin. There’s a choice of five ‘retro chic’ superminis – although the demo provides you with a Volkswagen Golf GTi and nothing else – and you’re plonked straight into a tight street circuit in the middle of a generic Côte d’Azur town (the French Riviera; there you go, you’ve learnt something today) for a close-knit race with several other opponents.

Unfortunately, I found one little issue right away, and that’s why Sumo decided to make the control schemes suck. I’m used to a lot of games offering me the gas on , the brake on  and the gears on the two front shoulder buttons. What made them decide to put the gears on  and  instead? Rather than use the triggers as I’d have liked to – as I have for a long time in Burnout and MotorStorm - I had to resort to the Gran Turismo option of the right stick so I could have my gears in a comfortable place on the controller.

Once I’d settled into the (personally) unusual controls, I found it wasn’t too bad and grew rather fond of the new control scheme. Find out why over the page.

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