14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest surprise of this year is actually not that Gran Turismo 5 launched but that, after all the time spent in development and all the rumors which were linked to it, the game is actually very good as long as the player is ready to ignore some weird interface choices and is ready to spend a lot of time with this racing simulator.
Gran Turismo 5 was initially demoed shortly after the launch of the PlayStation 3 and then got a Prologue release which was supposed to be at most one year away from the main game.
On November 24, the Polyphony Digital developed racing simulator finally arrived and the initial impression, forged in the Arcade mode, was very good.
Racing the Premium Shelby car on the Nurbungring track for about one hour, trying to assist various options offered by the game and learning how much to push the brakes in corners and how hard to kick the acceleration on the straight lines, has been a real treat for me.
The experience is, for one, flexible, allowing the player to determine how much he wants to be punished by the car he drives and to create a plan for shedding the various assists as he gets better.
And the driving model is a real achievement, worthy of all the time spent in development, delivering something which, in replays, looks closer to actual racing on a circuit than any other car-based game I have seen.
The 200 Premium cars, those who were created from the ground up for Gran Turismo 5, are also very beautiful and deliver the best experience when racing is done from the cockpit, managing to convey the pressure that a real driver is under.
Gran Turismo 5 is by no means perfect, with big loading times between menus and a few weird choices linked to race setup in the GT Mode dragging it back, but it's certainly better than I would have expected after all the delays.