So after years of waiting for Gran Turismo 5 to come out ... I went and bought a copy last night. After playing it for the past two days I have this to offer up:
I've played Gran Turismo since the original release of GT for the Play Station. I played it before I got into cars, and had no idea what I was doing. I remember playing it for hours and hours, tuning up my FC3S and dominating. Fast forward to today, and I have had alot of experience tuning cars, running them hard, and being exposed to the intricate sounds of many higher end cars.
With high hopes I tossed the CD into the drive and let the game fire up. The intro is cool, but certainly not the same level as GT4's, but an intro is just that ... worthless glitter. I started out the game with a Honda Civic Type-R (EK9), a really trick econobox car on roids, and off I went.
Driving Feel - The game has excellent feel. In GT3 I could drift a 600 BHP Skyline GTR with laughable ease, the breakaway was smooth and predictable. Then comes GT4 ... the cars just felt like you had a rubber band for a steering input. I can honestly say that GT5 returns the awesome finesse that GT3 had. I can feel the car understeer, and contrary to GT4 they actually TURN IN. Getting onto the power will break away the tires relatively smoothly, but like in real life it's easy to get the car to snap back on you if you don't stay in it. They did their homework here, and it's a bit of a learning curve to translate how much correction you need.
Sound - This is something that the entire GT series has epically failed at for over a decade. GT5 has MUCH better sounds ... in fact, many of the individual cars sound exactly the same. I bought a Nissan Silvia which has an SR20DET engine in it, and the start-up noise it makes actually cued memories of my SR20 starting up. The engine sounds like a small turbo 4-Cyl. ... the rotaries sound like weedeaters, the 4 cyls. have lag, the V8s ... well ... they are much better, but have this annoying rasp to them. For as much detail as GT beats on about, they should have included VTEC, and really worked with the community to identify sounds better. The game reaks of sound engineers ... too hell with what you interpret them to sound like, all car guys know what they should sound like, and some of them are wrong. This reminds me of a sound engineer that argued with me about how gun fire sounds when they themselves had never heard it in person.
Cars - 950 cars, pretty good selection that tries to please everyone. You may not find your exact car, but so far I've gotten some pretty cool ones! (SilEighty, 62 Buick, 69 Camaro Z28, Mugen CRX, etc.).
There are a few things I could improve on in the game, like the return of more wheel choice. I like being able to paint cars in the game, make my own track, etc. The fact that you can't modify the looks of the non-"premium" cars is lame.
To sum this game up, it's a polished version of all the other GTs as a palette. I like it, but as always, it could have been better in the basics.
I've played Gran Turismo since the original release of GT for the Play Station. I played it before I got into cars, and had no idea what I was doing. I remember playing it for hours and hours, tuning up my FC3S and dominating. Fast forward to today, and I have had alot of experience tuning cars, running them hard, and being exposed to the intricate sounds of many higher end cars.
With high hopes I tossed the CD into the drive and let the game fire up. The intro is cool, but certainly not the same level as GT4's, but an intro is just that ... worthless glitter. I started out the game with a Honda Civic Type-R (EK9), a really trick econobox car on roids, and off I went.
Driving Feel - The game has excellent feel. In GT3 I could drift a 600 BHP Skyline GTR with laughable ease, the breakaway was smooth and predictable. Then comes GT4 ... the cars just felt like you had a rubber band for a steering input. I can honestly say that GT5 returns the awesome finesse that GT3 had. I can feel the car understeer, and contrary to GT4 they actually TURN IN. Getting onto the power will break away the tires relatively smoothly, but like in real life it's easy to get the car to snap back on you if you don't stay in it. They did their homework here, and it's a bit of a learning curve to translate how much correction you need.
Sound - This is something that the entire GT series has epically failed at for over a decade. GT5 has MUCH better sounds ... in fact, many of the individual cars sound exactly the same. I bought a Nissan Silvia which has an SR20DET engine in it, and the start-up noise it makes actually cued memories of my SR20 starting up. The engine sounds like a small turbo 4-Cyl. ... the rotaries sound like weedeaters, the 4 cyls. have lag, the V8s ... well ... they are much better, but have this annoying rasp to them. For as much detail as GT beats on about, they should have included VTEC, and really worked with the community to identify sounds better. The game reaks of sound engineers ... too hell with what you interpret them to sound like, all car guys know what they should sound like, and some of them are wrong. This reminds me of a sound engineer that argued with me about how gun fire sounds when they themselves had never heard it in person.
Cars - 950 cars, pretty good selection that tries to please everyone. You may not find your exact car, but so far I've gotten some pretty cool ones! (SilEighty, 62 Buick, 69 Camaro Z28, Mugen CRX, etc.).
There are a few things I could improve on in the game, like the return of more wheel choice. I like being able to paint cars in the game, make my own track, etc. The fact that you can't modify the looks of the non-"premium" cars is lame.
To sum this game up, it's a polished version of all the other GTs as a palette. I like it, but as always, it could have been better in the basics.
