Revelation is a wondrous thing. It doesn’t matter whether you get it on the road to Damascus (Saul), in jail (Malcolm X) or even in the restrooms at the Coogee Bay Hotel (Candace Falzon/Sonny Bill Williams). What matters is that some climactic event changes your thinking and approach.

This review was initially going to be very different, but it got rewritten ¾ through as it was scarily like many reviews of Gran Turismo that have appeared in the past from us. It would have waxed on the graphics and replays, and waned on the dodgem car collisions and indestructible cars. It would have adopted that annoying, slightly scolding tone to makers Polyphony Digital.

Instead we’re going to focus on the positives. In our view, downloadable or not, cut down or not, cut price or not, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is a game that validates your purchase of the PlayStation 3. Finally.

You’re compelled to pick up a healthy selection of cars, which may alternatively irk you or add even more longevity to the experience. It means you can’t hoard your gold in the hope of picking up a supercar and destroying a healthy chunk of the racing challenges. Not only are the challenges segmented into four levels – C, B, A, and the special S class, but within these difficulty tiers is your expected car type challenges as well as specific vehicle task/races you’re required to compete. One thing to watch is to ensure you pay careful attention to exactly what car and year a given challenge uses – some manufacturers offer more than one edition of a vehicle – buying the wrong one will dent the credits you’re trying to stash away for the game’s crowning offering, a 07 edition Ferrari F1. And yes, you can believe it travels like a rocket.


When it comes to navigating through the game’s menu system before and after racing action, the feel is very deliberate. The game takes its own time getting from point A and point B, ironic for a racing game. Quite often you’ll be ineffectually jabbing at a button trying to skip a smooth, slow fade-in screen showing the new car you’ve won/bought. And while you’re given the option to jump into the new ride you’ve bought/won at the point of purchase/winning, the game will not give you the option of automatically offfering you in the right car(s) if you click on a event which has specific restrictions on what you can use, a feature we’ve grown to appreciate in platform rival Forza Motorsport on Xbox/Xbox 360. Instead you have to go to the garage, click on the relevant car, get into it, and then navigate back to the event. It’s a time waster.

However where GT5:P shines is when you’re racing. It’s smooth and it’s rewardingly fast when you get into a fast vehicle. The visuals still show jaggies on horizon and a strange pixellated non-antialiased effect is evident on the cars. It vanishes from your consciousness about five minutes in however as the vehicles when you get them racing around a track are a delight. I can’t recall any game where the vehicles impose on you to this degree at such different levels; in the sedate C class races the light bending off the glowing duco of the Ford Focus in front of you is almost hypnotic as you coast along; meanwhile the jolting dive of a Ferrari under heavy braking is another beast entirely when you’re right up their tailpipe. And while difficulty is a little on the lax side initially, by the time you hit the A class you’re working hard for your spot.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of GT5:P is it seems a lot more ‘human’ than most racing games when you’re dicing with the AI crew. Initially you don’t see it. In slower paced challenges, most cars have a couple of lines they hew to. But just when you think the computer controlled opposition slavishly sticks to a routine, the pace picks up and before you know it the cars ahead start getting loose around corners, occasionally overpowering their way into the sand trap before scurrying back on the track. Cars will jostle for position and knock into each other as well. It comes across as very realistic – and while many races you’ll head into turn one and see the same cars in the same spots, things quickly tend to shake out. The end result is you treat each car in front of you as more than a mere obstacle you know you can get past if you apply yourself. Now, you’ll hover on their tail and look for a flaw to exploit. It’s a subtle but telling difference. The first time you belt into a bend at Daytona well over the recommended speed, out of position courtesy of the cars in front sparring for position, and with a slower car looming in front of you, you’ll appreciate the difference between a cookie cutter slot-car racing opponent and these quirky, savvy ones.

Having given it a run with both the slick new Logitech wheel (designed in conjunction with Polyphony Digital) and with the Sixaxis controller, it comes down to this. If you want an immersive, in depth experience, you got to go with the wheel. It kicks like a mule too, by the way. Because it has a longer range of motion you really do need to rack it over on tight corners, which for the image conscious may take some getting used to. None of this subtle twitching here if you use on default. If you’re a bit of a seasoned gamer, and immersion for some inexplicable reason comes second to results, the controller is a perfect fallback. I get around the track faster with the controller, but for realism you obviously can’t go past the wheel. Having used quite a few in the past years, it’s not an insane extravaganza crafted with exotic materials like genuine dandruff flakes from Michael Schumacher’s old helmet, just rather a sturdy wheel with possibly the best force feedback I’ve experienced in either PC or console, the latter quite easily.

Whether you roll with wheel or controller, you really get the feeling you’re driving an object with mass and momentum. The suite of helpers on offer focus predominantly on increasing your traction and stability. Whilst there’s sure to be massive amounts of math thrown at it, it comes down to: the more effort you need to make, the faster your potential speed and the lower your possible times. You will be confronted with scenarios where to even get a passing time you will need to switch off some or all of the extra assists. The funny thing is the game is genuinely more fun when you don’t turn your car into a road hogging tarmac magnet – things really start to click when you light it up and start having to battle for control – the game kicks into another notch of immersion as the concentration required starts to escalate. We’ve got a video coming shortly of one of Sony’s employees showing how it’s done - smashing through a lightning (sub one minute) lap of the Eiger Nordwand on a Ferrari F1 – the focus and skill required to perform this is formidable, we certainly weren’t anywhere near it.

The fact it’s a demanding skill-heavy experience won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Gran Turismo series. But it’s important to dwell on the subject because the increasingly annoying approach the series takes regarding collisions (indestructible cars with seemingly rubber panels) needs to be taken into account. No matter whose fault it is, I shouldn’t be able to bludgeon my way to the front by careening into a car in front of me and knocking them out of the way. True, the game will penalise certain ramming offences, but all too often I can “cheat” by zooming into a corner, obviously at excess speed, and broadside a driver ahead who is cornering correctly – with no penalty. Half the time at least I’ll have made up significant time and maybe even knocked my poor victim into poor position, usually behind me. The vast majority of my “ramming” penalties are for the most unlikely scenario – belting full tilt directly into someone’s rear. Get a little sideways/skid or hit at an angle and more often than not you’ll profit. It’s a little disappointing – it’s scary trying to second guess a intensely devoted outfit like Polyphony Digital, but I find it very hard to believe a better solution couldn’t be implemented.

Corner cutting scumbags also may be in for a surprise. If you try to shortcut in a particularly egregious fashion, expect to get a slowdown penalty of long enough duration to cancel out any ill-gotten gains you may have enjoyed. That said, you still have surprising traction on grassy surfaces. Unless this is the sticky-icky grass, it’s hard to imagine any car not spinning out when it skids from road to field, but recover you will, more often than not. Sand punishes your speed a little more, but still seems remarkably friendly. So when your AI cars do goof up and get off the track, they’re back on the tar suspiciously fast. It’ll bug you until you realise you’re in the same boat. Car even. Even so, the executive summary is GT5:P could do with a little more punishment for wayward driving.

Multiplayer is in its embryonic stages, as are the extra online fruit – but it’s encouraging to see PD taking this seriously. Given the amount of beta attention the game received, it’s reasonable to expect a reasonably regular update regime occurring, so we’re going to file this in the “watch this space” camp. The whole crash ‘em up derby issue is one games has wrestled with since our virtual cars hit the information highway. It could be that GT’s rubber panelled cars are a superior alternative to having some cretin total your ride 20 metres from the finish line.

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue is not “the perfect storm” of gaming. It takes a little time to uncover what’s special about it. But this is a mark in its favour. Too many Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games wow us more in their first hour than any other time. GT5:P redresses this balance in favour of a slower, more fulfilling burn, and in doing so becomes the first game we comfortably can tell our mates – buy a PlayStation 3 to play this game. Roll on.