Gran Turismo 5 Prologue first impressions

by: Chuck - posted: 3/21/2008 12:35:00 PM

To be upfront that I am not a racing game fan as my attitude towards games tends to be that if it doesn't have guns or explosions I'm not usually interested. There's an entire subset of people who are diehards in this genre (including our own Dave Gamble) so I usually pass those games along to him. That said I have been following Gran Turismo 5 Prologue because the graphics and animation are jaw droopingly beautiful and I spent more time with Gran Turismo:HD than I care to admit. I'm also a huge fan of Top Gear and I'm looking forward to racing against The Stig's lap times on the replica version of the show's course. 

I was a bit shocked when Sony sent me a code to download the near final version of the game yesterday. I didn’t expect to see preview code for a few more weeks. The two gigabyte download took a few hours to download so I didn't get a chance to start playing the game until after midnight. I fired up the game with the intent of checking out the user interface, car selection, and maybe doing one or two laps around one of the courses. After 90 minutes of "just one more race" I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen so far which is impressive for such a non-driving game guy as myself.

Entering the game you are presented with the option to pick your starter car. You have 35,000 credits to spend and access to a selection of dealers ranging from Honda to Lamborghini. My first stop was to check out the selection of BMW’s as I figured the new 1-Series would be a good starter car. Unfortunately for me the car was priced a bit out of my range so I searched through the cars for something that would give me a good bang for my buck. I ended up picking the Mazda RX-8 as the car was within my budget and offered all kinds of good rotary powered goodness. While it’s cool to shop by car manufacturer it would have been nice to be able to filter the selection to see what cars were available within my price range.

After that I hit a few of the C level events to see what my new Mazda could do. I realized then I had made a mistake of buying too much car as my Mazda wasn’t eligible to race in good chunk of the entry level races either due to class restrictions or size restrictions. This wasn’t too much of a big deal as I was able to complete enough events to purchase a second car for these events. I bought a Mini Cooper S for my second car as it was eligible for a few more events.

Race level detail on the tracks is amazing and certainly a step beyond what Sony teased in the free Gran Turismo: HD a few months back. The track from GT:HD is featured in one of the events in Prologue and the at Polyphony Digital have gone back and touched the level up a bit (the mountain range in the background looks especially good). I also raced some of the city courses and they looked as good if not better than what Bizarre put in the Project Gotham 4. There doesn’t seem to be as much crowd density but the levels themselves are just beautiful. I didn’t play a lot of PGR4 but this does seem a little better looking.

The controls for the game are amazingly tight but it still feels sacrilegious to play a racing game without rumble or a wheel. That said the GT:P5 control scheme of using the left thumbstick to steer and right thumbstick to control throttle is rock solid. I was a bit of a candy-ass and only used automatic transmissions while playing so I haven’t checked out how hard it is to upshift and downshift but I really love the scheme as it’s almost as good as having a set of pedals and certainly feels better than using the trigger buttons as there’s more control over how much gas your putting into the car.

I have a feeling I’ll be burning rubber around digital race tracks all weekend so look for more impression next week. So far I’m impressed with what I’ve seen but I’m interested to see how deep the game is.