All the bad reviews are done by frustrated cement wall-surfers... If those people are happier playing NFS XYZ, I am not.
If you don't know, this Gran Turismo sports around 60 cars at the time of this writing (more get added sometimes with free patches), you can only start tuning after you clear the A serie (kind of like how WoW starts at lvl 60) and after you beat A, you get into the S series.
This is the most beautiful game i have ever seen. The lousiest car you buy looks like a million bucks in this game. The replays are breath-taking, from the way you see the grass moved by the cars on ground shots to the way the game actually download online replays to show while you are letting it roll in demo mode. Graphics are unreal, I give them a full mark even if I can only predict we will see even better looking cars in the final version.
But just being able to look at the F1 Ferrari and any dashboard in a race for that matter convince me they are as good as any racing game i saw ever got in 1080p.
Onto gameplay mechanics & control, the way you feel the weight on the cars coming down on slopes and in various angles is amazing, you really feel the physics working at all times, unlike NFS where you feel like it's about as realistic as the sweet talk & breasts of a stripper. This is all meat, any true rally, F1 and standard racing fan will attest to it. If anyone complains about the lack of car damage, look at what the complains are...
All the reviews I read are people complaining about the new penalty system.
The penaties only start with the S Serie.
That means most sloppy drivers get through until after A where they actually have to learn the tracks & physics and drive correctly.
Now, we have a racing line helper, auto transmission with braking indications and those people still can't drive right... Mind you the brake indicator works better if you brake in advance too, something every real car driver knows but some seem to forget once they are in-game.
Instead they complain about how they get a 3 or 4 second penalty for ramming a wall, another opponent (the good ole "no need to brake" and use the opponents as a barrier to turn) or short-circuiting chicanes and hairpins.
Sorry kids, but this was the way you were always meant to play Gran Turismo.
Just because there wasn't any penalty before didn't meant you should drive that way.
If you don't like it, stay off Gran Turismo and our online experience will only remain the better for it.
You try getting into a car race and ram someone. Then try to get out alive after complaining because of the penalty they gave you. That's not a behavior any other racer or race official would tolerate.
Now that this game can be played online, Gran Turismo has to enforce decent driver behavior or the game will become unenjoyable.
If this racing game is about realism, it will penalize unrealistic driving behavior. Don't worry, other games are still there to let you drive your away into other cars, you just won't be able to brag about owning people at Gran Turismo if you don't care to drive sensibly.
Now that it's off my chest, i apologize, but hey you shouldn't ram opponnents or bounce off walls. It's unfair and you'd die or get killed by angry oponents if you did that in real life.
What's the point of modeling real cars with real tracks and real physics if you ain't gonna play it for real???
Moving onto other aspects of the game, some engine sounds were dead on (Ferrari 430, S2000) while other really felt off. I'm sure this is a time constraint and will be tweaked as the final game progresses.
The music I found was really ordinary, aside from the great 1st place tune (Steve Vai?? lol) and the AWESOME ending song (you hear it as the credits roll after you complete A serie), which you could swear was played by DreamTheater (but is actually the sole creation of a single japanese virtuoso),, I just tuned it out and play my own mp3s in the background, leaving just enough engine noise to hear my gear shifts.
This iteration of Gran Turismo really shines. The graphics are the best for a racing game ever, the control is as always dead on without being all the same as last version. I really didn't like GT4's "feel" about the way it controled, but I feel this one is a lot tighter. You feel the downforce sticking some cars on the track at high speeds just like you feel them slipping away as soon as you slow down to a point. The dizzying feeling you get breeching 320 km/h the first couple time around reminded me of WipeOut on PS1 as far as sheer sense of speed is concerned. You almost feel the gravity of angled turns and cannot help but to put your weight in like you would in a real car going 160 km/h in a turn. Then you get out of the turn and look at the behind-view to hear the cool swoosh of your Ford GT Concept slicing the air, looking better than any other racing game with 15 opponents and going over 300 km/h. Satisfaction.
In that sense GranTurismo 5 Prologue exceeds a lot of "finished" games already.
It already needs a driving skill to be succesfull at most other games can only dream of attaining.
As far as I'm concerned, the gameplay mechanics and control are perfect. The graphics, aside from very minor aliasing, are flawless. The crowd feel empty, but it's just the Prologue, people will attend the big race only, in that sense it is realistic once again lol. The only thing that didn't jump out at me was the sound dept. It is pretty much only because some of the engines felt off and the music was bland for a game of this caliber.
For 40$, this game already promise a lot more than most "full" racing games, even with admitedly being just a Prologue.
Free online competition, new cars and events being added all the time, awesome videos on GT-TV on some of the game's showcase cars, it really offers a lot once you discover the joy of online racing after you get through A series.
Some minor complaints (no Toyotas??), and the uncertainty of next patches content & frequency aside,it totally deserves its price and I'm going to get a lot of miles in my GT Prologue cars with that 40$ until the real games comes out.