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Apr 01
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The original Gran Turismo game was a triumph in my eyes, the first time a game had ever made driving feel even remotely realistic and it was the main reason I bought a Playstation. I spent hours and hours tuning up cars and racing the same tracks repeatedly to gain minor improvements or to win special prize cars, but on the release of Gran Turismo 2 I had moved on to other gaming pastures and didn’t really find the time for all of the tweaking and racing that the series demands of it’s players. Between then and now I did get to play both GT3 and GT4 and there wasn’t really a whole lot to draw me back to the series because by then I’d gotten back into the FPS genre and was loving Unreal Tournament, Half Life & Red Faction more than anything else. In more recent years though my interest in driving games has been piqued once more, starting with Project Gotham 1 and 2 which though ‘arcadey’ in style were pretty involved racing games. On the current generation of consoles I found myself disappointed in PGR3 but enjoyed Forza 2 considerably, though I never really found the time to plumb the depths it had to offer. So if there’s been any time in the last decade that I’ve had the potential to get back into racing sims then now is the time, and I’m actually quite excited.
I got hold of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue a couple of days after launch, on a nice lazy Sunday afternoon following a lie-in and a McDonalds breakfast so naturally I was in a good mood. Unfortunately the mood was soured slowly and gradually as I spent 15 minutes installing the game only to find I had to spend an additional 45 minutes updating it before I could start racing, clearly – this is not what I bought a console for. Once the hour of admin was out of the way (in which I spent £30 on eBay, checked my credit rating and helped bake scones) I launched the game and watched the intro which is graphically stunning but doesn’t quite manage the spine-tingling brilliance of the original GT1 intro. The menus are straight-forward and offer a couple of cool little features including a live rolling display of world track temperatures and when you leave the controller unattended the display shows panning shots of your current car in various pretty locations then flips to a replay if you leave it a little longer.
As with the other GT games the main menu presents you with access to an empty garage, a small sum of money and freedom to peruse a variety of dealership, I started off by buying a purple Mini Cooper S for 28,500 credits of the 35,000 you start with. The first thing I noticed about the game is that once you buy a car, that’s it – you just have to get in and race it, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to buy parts or tune the car at all – from what I’ve heard you unlock the ability to tune certain elements of the car once you’ve completed the A, B and C car classes. Getting into playing the game is pretty easy and once in there it’s relatively compelling and if you’re a noob like me you really can feel that there’s a lot to learn before you’ll have mastered the complex physics of the game. To help those of us who aren’t GT monsters (you know who you are) there’s an optional racing line indicator which not only gives you the best position to be in, it also shows where to break and calls out the required speed for certain tough corners. Regardless of your experience though I think everyone should at least turn off the traction control, by design it limits your ability to drift in the corners and makes the cars feel much too rigid and unfriendly.
The arcade section of the game adds a slightly different twist, offering the choice of all six tracks (High Speed Ring, Daytona Superspeedway, Fuji Speedway, Eiger Nordwand, Suzuka and London) on which you can enter a Time Trial, Drift Trial or a regular race. Before launching into the race you are offered a “Course Guide” which shows real video relating to the selected track accompanied by some annoyingly cheesy musak (along with much of the game), these are amusing but would be better accompanied by voice-over rather than scrolling text. The multiplayer facilities include a 2 player split screen mode (which appears to be as bearable as any split-screen racing) and the ability to race online, which consists of events similar to the single player game and seemed a little picky about which cars you were allowed to enter into which race. Once into the online game there’s a brief period of matchmaking before you’re thrown into a race, after which it plays just like a regular game. The play was a little laggy and a few cars seemed to ‘shimmer’ in and out of existence (though none dropped out) but I’ve seen worse in the past and I did have bittorrent running in the background. The most noticeable problem however was that the race was largely a jostle-fest with little semblance of fair play, I do wonder whether online racing games can really work with such a high number of players (my race had 11).
The other noteworthy features are the News feed, GT-TV and Rankings, all accessible from the main menu. News offers a mix of useful tips (currently talking about router setup, UPnP and port forwarding) and information about game issues, one mentions a workaround for a bug with the Rankings feature which allows you to see how you compare to other players online though there doesn’t seem to be any notion of ‘friends’ against which you could compare yourself.
All said and done, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue does exactly what it says on the tin – it offers a taster of what is to come and whilst really doesn’t feel quite like a full game I think there’s enough content in there to make it worth the £25 retail price (though if you’re savvy you can pick it up for £18 online). Will GT5P get me back into sim racing? Probably not. With GTA IV on the horizon I doubt I’ll spend too much time playing Prologue but the landscape may be different when the final game is release so who can possibly say?
Score: 8 / 10
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.