Gran Turismo 5 is Hard Work

Don’t cars have nice headlights these days..

I hesitate to say that I grew up playing Gran Turismo, because that would imply that I’ve actually grown up. But I do remember first playing it on the PS 1 and my amazement in how it looked and handled. And the cars had reflections. I’ve been through all the versions since then and even invested in a force feedback steering wheel that added a lot to the PS2 version.

So it was with some excitement that I fired up the PS3 version this weekend.  The intro video is very impressive and after watching that I was looking forward to going racing. And then it got really tricky – at least for me. GT 5 has a mode where you can pick a driver and then manage them through a racing season. In fact for me that seems to be the only way I can play some parts of the game. This was somewhat depressing. I didn’t get my steering wheel down from the loft just so that I could watch some other bloke drive round a track.

I took all the licence tests (I’d forgotten how boring these are) and still ended up watching Mr. Fernandez drive around in a car I’d just bought.  And the program kept asking me to sign in to the Playstation network even though I already was signed in. This sign-in kept failing, which was also a bit annoying.

In the end I switched to arcade mode and did some rally driving. The good news is that my old steering wheel works fine with the game. The bad news is that the whole thing seems just too much like hard work. I’m sure that for a dedicated petrol head who can obsess about cam belts and marvel at the accuracy of the car images and their handling models GT 5 is great news, but for me I ended up lobbing a copy of Split Second into the drive and driving in a completely unrealistic way through exploding landscapes. Much more fun.