Yesterday evening I noticed a post on the Playstation Community Gran Turismo Forum about a “Time Trial” event that is being held. Even though it was already on week 8, and I obviously missed the first 7 trials I thought I would have a pop at this to see how my times compare with other drivers.

After only 18-20 laps I found myself in the top 20 driver on the London Reverse, Citroen C4 combination. Fantastic I thought; I can do well here. However shaving those last few tenths and hundreths of a second off my time was getting a lot harder. You have to hit every braking point and every apex perfectly on every corner, and all in one good lap. Much like a qualifying session but you have much longer to do it in of course.

Now I have always been a fan of chasing around my Ghost car in previous GT editions, but having the Online Rankings built into the game in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue just makes it so much more addictive. I just couldn’t get myself to stop trying and every one of the last 50-100 laps I said to myself this is it, come on, last lap, new pb … until I finally decided to call it a night in 11th place with a time of 1:01:121, with the #1 time being somewhere around the 1:00:4xx.

WARNING: If you have a bit of a temper or get annoyed with Games when you get stuck, Time Trial is dangerous! I was getting so frustrated with myself, at myself, that I couldn’t beat my previous time, over and over again, and just as I thought I was ahead my *&%*$& of a ghost comes zooming past because I was a little too slow out of that all important corner. You simply can’t imagine how badly I wanted to hurt myself!

I use the G25 Steering Wheel to play Gran Turismo and only did a couple of races with the pad as the Wheel adds another dimension to the game and it just isn’t the same without. I set everything to Professional with all Aids turned off (ABS set on 1 in Quick Tune though as it’s too sensitive otherwise)

First of all the Graphics are truly amazing, that’s all there is to say about it. The sound on the other hand is a little weak in my opinion, especially if you are playing from the classic GT view (in front of the car). The sound is much better from the cockpit view although the wind noise get’s a bit much at times.

Onto the more important parts of the game, the handling & driving feel. For me personally it all feels very good although the cars all feel a bit light and I struggle to really feel any weight at all to the cars. The AI on the A, B and C class races (which is all that’s available initially is pretty crap. Especially on some races where the computer cars do exactly the same everytime you restart the race, and it’s more of a puzzle where you have to learn the car’s positions & behaviour to complete the challenge. It took me a couple of days to complete all A, B and C class races more of less with ease.

The difficulty and AI improve immensly when you enter S Class races (unlocked when completing the other classes). The computer actually battles for position with you and overtakes quite nicely. I haven’t quite completed all the S-Class races yet and I actually find some of them very difficult. You need to put in some serious practise and some time developing your quick tune setup (also unlocked when completing the initial classes). Often when you have a choice of cars I find that it is almost impossible to reach the top 3 with certain cars.

All in all I think GT5 is trying to find a balance between Racing Simulation and Arcade Racer which isn’t quite working out yet. I don’t think there is enough of a dedicated sim racers market to go all out simulation which is why the mixed bag is on offer.

Conclusion then is that if you played and liked the previous editions of Gran Turismo you will also like GT5P. I do think that the game is quite suitable for Arcade racers and offers lots of variety in terms of Racing & Challenges, especially for the Arcade racer. My recommendation would be to get a Steering Wheel if you haven’t got one as it is a much better game played with (ideally a Force Feedback) steering wheel. Yes, GT5P has it’s flaws (you might have noticed I didn’t mention online play at all) but I am sure the full GT5 release will be an absolute peach of a game!

Originally I always wanted a P3 for one reason only, the Gran Turismo Series! For anything else I always had the Xbox 360 which is brilliant as well, especially for online gaming. The downside of course is the Xbox live subscription fee.

Now that I finally have the Playstation 3 I don’t feel the need for the Xbox 360 anymore. The games play just as well on the P3 and so far I find some play even better with the Playstation Controllers. The big downside of course is that there are less people in the online community but on the other hand, it’s free!

Anyway to combat this, let’s just say, lack of gamers, I am looking at starting a gaming group for P3 gamers of similar interest to myself. Check out my “The Big Friendly Gaming Group” page for more details!

Please check out my About Page which describes in more detail what my Blog is all about, and why on earth I’m using some children’s story character as my Pseudo ID.

For the first time then, Goodbye World, I thank you for reading and hope you get something from my Blogs & Reviews. Cu soon!