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Note, my opinion is based on the PS3 version while driving with Professional physics, ASM/TCS off, using a Sparco cockpit and Logitech G25 wheel.
PRICE nearly a no-brainer buy for fans; but a little high considering it's a prologue, limited number of events and cars.
GRAPHICS improved as expected given the possibilities of the PS3. In a way the sensation of speed has decreased, an ironic side effect of the smooth picture quality. It's easier to look further into the distance.
SOUND really stunning, accurate, raspy, and powerful. Enormous help to the gameplay to hear unique exhaust notes for each car. Huge improvement from GT4.
CARS there are plenty of great cars for everyone rather than recreating hundreds of nearly identical and/or boring, useless-for-racing cars, this game sticks to the cars that are meant to go fast, and does them well. The sound and handling of each is unique and seems to be accurate. And the Ferrari F2007, once you beat the S races and earn the required 2 million credits, is just so cool to drive (even though its quick tune options are limited you can't modify the power, weight, ride height, springs, or driving physics).
TRACKS the Daytona trioval is a lot more interesting to drive than a super speedway like Motegi. Daytona also comes with a road course, and even though I feel driving a road course in the infield of an oval feels a bit unnatural, it's still a fun course. There's also Fuji, Suzuka, London, and High Speed Ring. Not bad.
AI improved number and varied driving personalities, but they still defy the rules of clean racing and the laws of physics with impunity. They drive right through you as you serve your penalties (which they often cause). You'll see shortcutting, using runoff areas for acceleration, wallriding, refusing to back off even when their line is hopeless, and of course bumping and shoving you, leaving you to collect from the new array of infractions. It's getting a bit harsh, but the restart button is only a menu away.
HANDLING if you select "standard" the cars handle pretty much like they did in GT4; if you put it on "professional" then it takes on a more realistic (i.e. unforgiving) character. Default settings are a little mushy even with cars you'd expect to be nimble, and the professional physics render the supercars (Corvette, Ford GT, Ferrari) nearly uncontrollable. After unlocking the S group and quick tune, some cars can have their downforce cranked up to get some handling back, but cars that are more about beauty than function don't have this available. Many of them remain just a tiny mistake away from an unrecoverable slide. No wonder so many inexperienced drivers crack them up (especially if they turn off the driver aids). I completed all the races (except three of the S races) on "professional" but since the AI is not subject to the same realities, you may occasionally need to set it back to "standard" in order to be competitive.
So far the game has overall been enjoyable, and much of the struggle can be overcome by selecting the correct car for each race, just as it was in GT4.
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Right up front, I'll point out the three most obvious things about GT5 Prologue.
1. It looks gorgeous
2. The AI is abominable.
3. There is still no car damage.
To use a lovely english expression : it's all mouth and no trousers. Look past the HD graphics and hype and you'll find Gran Turismo 1 lurking here.
The Gran Turismo games are known for their accurate car handling and fantastic graphics, and GT5 Prologue is no exception. The problem is that it is all absolutely ruined by the other driver AI. Previous Gran Turismo titles have never exactly shone when it comes to the AI, but in GT5 it's simply non-existent. It's not that the AI is dumb, it's just not there. The other cars all drive on rails, irrespective of where you are. For example, on the High Speed Ring circuit there's a challenge to get from the back of the pack to the front in a single lap. In the car they give you, it is 100% impossible to come any higher than 3rd, and that's a stretch. The driving-on-rails is so accurate and predictable that you can actually predict exactly where every car will be at any given point. You'll come up behind the Ford Focus at the end of the second turn, and don't even think about passing him on the outside because he will always jink to the left for no reason as he goes across the bridge. If you're in the way, then tough. The game will just force you off the track. At the next corner, the Mazda 6 will always follow the identical line inside the corner, again irrespective of whether you're there.
The same is true in the other types of race. Within minutes of playing this game, you will find yourself making a tidy corner only to have a much faster car come right up behind you and ram you off the track because you're in the way of it's pre-programmed line. To see how truly awful it is, start a race at the back and watch the 15 cars in front of you. They'll all cut the same corner in the same way, every lap, all with the identical puff of dirt as they do it.
It is simply abominable.
The problem is that this issue was solved long ago by the likes of well just about every other racing franchise out there. It's compounded by the fact that there is still no car damage or dirt in GT5. You can stuff any car into a concrete armco at 175mph and it will simply bounce off without so much as a scratch. To think that Polyphony could put out a game with no car damage and ruinous AI on a next-gen console in 2008 just boggles the mind given how accomplished the competition is (think: Project Gotham Racing).
So what about the eye-candy aspect? Well it runs at 1080p (full HD) and it looks absolutely spectacular. The textures are crisp and don't blur out at highly obtuse angles like they would on an X-Box. The car models are beautiful as are the various effects like the real-time reflections and the colour-flip paint jobs. There is some aliasing on high-contrast areas but detail popup is minimal. There are very noticable level-of-detail swaps on some of the cars where they swap from a low detail to a high detail version. It's most noticable on the Daytona circuit where you'll occasionally see the shading on the back of a car pop noticably as the model swaps to it's higher resolution version. In fact the eye-candy aspect is only marred slightly be the fact that the game clearly doesn't run at 60 frames per second. Well it does on sparsely populated tracks but in the thick of the action on some circuits, you'll see noticable slowdown which you just shouldn't have on a console as powerful as a PS3.
What other things to know about? Well the online aspect of the game has a lot of promise but it's buggy at best. If your PS3 isn't set up pefectly on a broadband network (NAT type 1) it just won't connect to the servers. If you're lucky enough to have a good setup, then even when it does connect, the racing is a bit dodgy. It's obvious that the sample rate for your system communicating with all the others is fairly slow as you'll often see your opponents cars jump across the circuit from one side to the other, or suddenly appear to brake or accelerate at light speed as the servers catch up.
When you come to use the game for the first time, be prepared for a long wait. It seems to copy the entire blu-ray disc on to the internal hard drive which takes a good 15 minutes, then as soon as you connect, it will download a huge update which will take 5 to 10 minutes to download and another 5 minutes to install. So out-of-the-box to first race is about 30 minutes. That seems a bit odd to me I was entirely expecting the game to run off the disc like many of the other PS3 titles.
So GT5 Prologue : it's great eye-candy, sure. But the two biggest, most long-standing problems with the GT franchise are still present. Awful AI and no car damage. The press previews and talk from Polyphony indicate that the full game will have car damage, but historically, they've never been known to change their underlying game engines between the 'Prologue' and the full versions of GT. They have always claimed that they've fixed the AI with each successive version of the game, but honestly GT5 Prologue has taken a massive step backwards. They say it's better than ever but it's actually worse than ever. So when they say there will be car damage in the full game, I say 'cry wolf' I'm afraid.
It's an ominous omen for GT5 later this year. Sure it'll have more cars and more tracks. But chances are it will have the same problems the GT franchise has always had, and that's simply not good enough. Couple that with the questionable frame rate and online problems and that could be disastrous.
I dearly love the GT franchise I've had every one of them and I've been hoping and praying that they would one day fix the AI problems and the lack of car damage. If they've not done it on the PS3, then it's just never going to happen, and that is a sad indictment of Polyphony's marketing strategy. I've played this game a lot, desperately wanting to like it but I always put the controller down and am left with an empty feeling. It's just not exciting.
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I've been a fan of racing games for a long time, and actually race in various forms of SCCA racing myself. I've raced high and low powered front and rear wheel drived cars and have learned a lot through competing and the various schools and classes I've attended. I had never played a Gran Turismo game prior to Prologue, having always had XBox or other consoles previously. I had heard so much about it that I didn't even bother with demos and simply bought the game the day it was available. Now having played it for several months all I have to say is I don't think I'll even consider buying the full GT5 whenever it makes it here.
My major gripes are as follows:
1) Atrocious game play layout
2) Poor physics
3) AI and damage are absolutely laughable.
To start with the game play is ridiculous. It reminds me of the old days of games where you do routines over and over and over to gain points/experience/money to buy the next level. The success you have in the races and your carrer mean little in GT5, only if you have the right car or not. You can breeze through each of the various classes by simply buying the right car. Buy the Ford Focus for C class and you cruise through... buy the GT-R for B class and you cruise right through. Buy the Ford GT for the A class and you cruise right through. The only hitch is the little added difficulty of the car specific races. So then you have to repeat races over and over to get enough money to buy the random extra cars. Disappointing, tedious and overall abysmal game play layout.
The online gameplay is even worse... it degrades into bumper cars with idiots and no penalties of meaning, and the pairing system and time from game to game is horrible! It is a very nice touch though that you can actually earn money racing online for your offline activities. That I thought was well though out and appreciable.
On to the physics. I've spent years learning to drive the right way and how to execute proper control. There are tricks of the trade on how to guide a car through certain types of corners and how to achieve certain handling. It simply does not exist in this game. Trail braking and various power on scenarios are not met with the appropriate vehicle responses. Additionally, vehicles with wildly different characteristics will handle nearly identical in this game. It doesn't matter what aids are or not enabled, or what level of physics you choose. Throttle on response was one of the poorest aspects I though in general, but turn in effects weren't far behind! Amazingly pathetic for a game that bills itself as a "the real driving simulator". It also appalling that in some cases the fastest way to execute part of a track is to bounce yourself off a fence or wall. I started doing it out of humor and was horrified to see it actually help in certain situations.
The AI and damage are really in that same vane. They do nothing, they don't exist, and it's all just superfluous featuring. Everyone else has covered these in other reviews, so no need to rehash the well known here.
All griping aside. The graphics are beautiful. The tracks are well rendered. The overall effects and feel of the game are beautiful. But as far as a driving experience and something fun to play... it just doesn't hold any allure in any way for me. Really a true disappointment on many levels from a franchise that I had always heard to be the best out there. There are already much better other racing games out there on the PS3 that I feel have given a lot better game play experience as well and while their physics engines aren't anything great either, at least they don't try to claim "simulation" and get at least a few things down better than GT5 even does even if they are less complete packages for the physics.
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The game is as good as the last GT game, graphics are better and the cars seem to respond more lifelike but and this is big, the tuning aspect is maybe 15% of what it was and WOW!!!!! the penalties in the class S races are EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING, for example you hit a car and get a penalty usually about 3 to 5 seconds depending on how hard you his the other car. But if a car hits you no penalty for the cpu car and if that car pushed you off track guess what 60% of the time you will get a short cut penalty for going off the track, when that car hit you, it will drive you MAD!!!!! Every car you want to play with you have to buy and if you don't like it you might get back 1/4 of it selling price when you sell it back and when money is hard to come by unless you play online it makes it tough not to be forced to play the same quick big money race over and over and over just to get the cash to buy the many cars you have to buy to complete the game, for example, you have to purchase a BMW M3 100,000, a Ferrari f430, 250,000, a Ferrari 599, 350,000 a Ferrari f40 450,000 and a few other cars to complete the game and with the prize money for the races around 20,000 for first and always having to start 16th rather that QUALIFY it makes it tough and like I said FRUSTRATING. I want to trade it in but I just can't because I am a fan of the game but its sometimes hard to play for more than 1 hour before your blood begins to boil.
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Another great looking GT game with semi-simulation game play and some annoyingly unresolved core issues. Your opponents are still mindless cruise missiles who do not respond to your presence on the track at all and who never make mistakes. Plus damage modeling remains absent, though promised DLC sometime this summer is supposed to address that issue. Those of us who remember the "damage" system from GT2 (or Forza for that matter) where you hit a wall at 140 and then the car pulls a bit to the right may be a bit skeptical as to how this will be implemented. The usual GT combination of annoyingly flawless competitors and no damage makes using the other cars as bumpers to improve cornering as tempting as ever, especially in some of the more brutally difficult challenges. (See below.)
This specific implementation has some unique issues. Those of you who feel the GT-R is a bit over-hyped will quickly grow tired of all the added background content about that vehicle in the game. Much like the Acura NSX was the former over favorably modeled vehicle in prior GTs, the GT-R here seems a bit too perfect. A good third of the 75 cars in GT5) featured are useless and boring, a familiar problem from GT4 with its dozens of bland Japanese cars that those outside the Nipponese car buying market could care less about. (5 Skyline Models! 7 Suzuki and Daihatsu Micro-Cars!) However, most of the cars here are reasonably interesting and the graphics are beautiful. The handling model also appears to be as accurate and distinctive for each car as might be expected.
The mere six tracks in the game grow very tiring very quickly. The Daytona oval is as dull as could be imagined, and the London circuit, though gorgeous, is under-utilized in the actual in-game events due to the fact that it has no decent straights and too many sharp angled turns.
Besides bad opponent AI, no damage, GT-R propaganda, a few dull cars, and a teeny variety of tracks, are there any other problems? You betcha! The real problem here is the gameplay. There are about 40 races in the game total at this point, grouped into 4 tiers, each of which must be completed in order to advance. Some of the races, especially in the A tier, are vastly difficult especially A-8, the Ferrari pass them all in one lap. If you can't win that last race in the tier, you need to grind away over and over until you finish it in order to advance.
When you finally get to the last tier ("S"), you will be disappointed; though you can now finally tune your cars, your tuning options mainly amount to either minute changes in camber and brake balance a la NASCAR, or beefing hp up / weight down or vice versa in order to balance cars out in each race. The added "joy" of S class racing is the return of the GT4 5 second penalty for bumping other racers and / or the landscape. As was also the case in GT4, you are penalized even if the drone racers hit you, while they are not.
The game so ends with a whimper rather than a bang as you strap weights onto your car to trim it into the point category, and then grind your teeth in frustration as your cruise missile opponents hit you from behind and vanish into the horizon as you lose the race because of the penalty levied because of the unavoidable and unintentional collision. An actual damage system and opponents with more brains than a pigeon would be a much better solution to the bumper cars problem, but this is what the geniuses at Polyphony give us instead.
To add insult to injury, the GT crew in recent news have announced that the actual GT5 game may not be out till 2010 and the much hyped DLC upgrade may not be out in summer 08 as originally promised. Lovely! In the meantime, why buy this at all? I would suggest buying Grid instead, which is a fully realized game with functional damage, an actual campaign structure, challenging artificial opponents who also make mistakes and even crash at times, and more than twice as many tracks. Sure there is no trendy BGM, the handling is not as realistic, and there are less cars modeled than GT5P, but damage and human style opponent AI more than make up for those deficiencies.
Rent GT5P if you want to see the pretty graphics, play Grid during the loooong wait for the real GT5 and then see if the end Polyphony product is a worthy enough game to spend 60 clams on. Content and graphics in the GT games are fine, but the series needs to see damage modeling and more challenging competition in the single player game in order to remain a viable contender in the next-gen racing game market.
