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Looking past the "eye candy" graphics...this game hasn't changed in 10 years.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 21
Date: April 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

My PS3 is connected with a HDMI cord on a Sony Bravia 46" LCD HDTV....and GT5 Prologue looks amazing.

But aside from looks (and engine sounds), the game is a huge letdown.
The gameplay has changed very little from the first edition of this franchise in ....was it 98' ?
Anyway, I think Polyphony should concentrate on more important things than realistic graphics....like gameplay, AI and an overhauled penalty system during the S class races

If it wasn't for Microsoft's failure rate of the XBox 360, I would have opted for getting Forza 2 ....a much better and realistic driving/racing simulation.

HOLY PENALTY

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: April 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game is as good as the last GT game, graphics are better and the cars seem to respond more lifelike but and this is big, the tuning aspect is maybe 15% of what it was and WOW!!!!! the penalties in the class S races are EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING, for example you hit a car and get a penalty usually about 3 to 5 seconds depending on how hard you his the other car. But if a car hits you no penalty for the cpu car and if that car pushed you off track guess what 60% of the time you will get a short cut penalty for going off the track, when that car hit you, it will drive you MAD!!!!! Every car you want to play with you have to buy and if you don't like it you might get back 1/4 of it selling price when you sell it back and when money is hard to come by unless you play online it makes it tough not to be forced to play the same quick big money race over and over and over just to get the cash to buy the many cars you have to buy to complete the game, for example, you have to purchase a BMW M3 100,000, a Ferrari f430, 250,000, a Ferrari 599, 350,000 a Ferrari f40 450,000 and a few other cars to complete the game and with the prize money for the races around 20,000 for first and always having to start 16th rather that QUALIFY it makes it tough and like I said FRUSTRATING. I want to trade it in but I just can't because I am a fan of the game but its sometimes hard to play for more than 1 hour before your blood begins to boil.

wait for the real game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: May 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Absolutely stunning graphics and more realistic handling, but bear in mind that this is only the Prologue - a taste of things to come. Very limited cars and no tuning allowed :( I pretty much finished the game in 2 days.

I hope they offer the full game as a download at a reduced price if you already purchased the Prologue.

Different console. Same problems.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 82 / 102
Date: May 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Right up front, I'll point out the three most obvious things about GT5 Prologue.
1. It looks gorgeous
2. The AI is abominable.
3. There is still no car damage.

To use a lovely english expression : it's all mouth and no trousers. Look past the HD graphics and hype and you'll find Gran Turismo 1 lurking here.

The Gran Turismo games are known for their accurate car handling and fantastic graphics, and GT5 Prologue is no exception. The problem is that it is all absolutely ruined by the other driver AI. Previous Gran Turismo titles have never exactly shone when it comes to the AI, but in GT5 it's simply non-existent. It's not that the AI is dumb, it's just not there. The other cars all drive on rails, irrespective of where you are. For example, on the High Speed Ring circuit - there's a challenge to get from the back of the pack to the front in a single lap. In the car they give you, it is 100% impossible to come any higher than 3rd, and that's a stretch. The driving-on-rails is so accurate and predictable that you can actually predict exactly where every car will be at any given point. You'll come up behind the Ford Focus at the end of the second turn, and don't even think about passing him on the outside because he will always jink to the left for no reason as he goes across the bridge. If you're in the way, then tough. The game will just force you off the track. At the next corner, the Mazda 6 will always follow the identical line inside the corner, again irrespective of whether you're there.
The same is true in the other types of race. Within minutes of playing this game, you will find yourself making a tidy corner only to have a much faster car come right up behind you and ram you off the track because you're in the way of it's pre-programmed line. To see how truly awful it is, start a race at the back and watch the 15 cars in front of you. They'll all cut the same corner in the same way, every lap, all with the identical puff of dirt as they do it.
It is simply abominable.

The problem is that this issue was solved long ago by the likes of - well - just about every other racing franchise out there. It's compounded by the fact that there is still no car damage or dirt in GT5. You can stuff any car into a concrete armco at 175mph and it will simply bounce off without so much as a scratch. To think that Polyphony could put out a game with no car damage and ruinous AI on a next-gen console in 2008 just boggles the mind given how accomplished the competition is (think: Project Gotham Racing).

So what about the eye-candy aspect? Well - it runs at 1080p (full HD) and it looks absolutely spectacular. The textures are crisp and don't blur out at highly obtuse angles like they would on an X-Box. The car models are beautiful as are the various effects like the real-time reflections and the colour-flip paint jobs. There is some aliasing on high-contrast areas but detail popup is minimal. There are very noticable level-of-detail swaps on some of the cars where they swap from a low detail to a high detail version. It's most noticable on the Daytona circuit where you'll occasionally see the shading on the back of a car pop noticably as the model swaps to it's higher resolution version. In fact the eye-candy aspect is only marred slightly be the fact that the game clearly doesn't run at 60 frames per second. Well - it does on sparsely populated tracks but in the thick of the action on some circuits, you'll see noticable slowdown which you just shouldn't have on a console as powerful as a PS3.

What other things to know about? Well the online aspect of the game has a lot of promise but it's buggy at best. If your PS3 isn't set up pefectly on a broadband network (NAT type 1) it just won't connect to the servers. If you're lucky enough to have a good setup, then even when it does connect, the racing is a bit dodgy. It's obvious that the sample rate for your system communicating with all the others is fairly slow as you'll often see your opponents cars jump across the circuit from one side to the other, or suddenly appear to brake or accelerate at light speed as the servers catch up.

When you come to use the game for the first time, be prepared for a long wait. It seems to copy the entire blu-ray disc on to the internal hard drive which takes a good 15 minutes, then as soon as you connect, it will download a huge update which will take 5 to 10 minutes to download and another 5 minutes to install. So out-of-the-box to first race is about 30 minutes. That seems a bit odd to me - I was entirely expecting the game to run off the disc like many of the other PS3 titles.

So GT5 Prologue : it's great eye-candy, sure. But the two biggest, most long-standing problems with the GT franchise are still present. Awful AI and no car damage. The press previews and talk from Polyphony indicate that the full game will have car damage, but historically, they've never been known to change their underlying game engines between the 'Prologue' and the full versions of GT. They have always claimed that they've fixed the AI with each successive version of the game, but honestly - GT5 Prologue has taken a massive step backwards. They say it's better than ever but it's actually worse than ever. So when they say there will be car damage in the full game, I say 'cry wolf' I'm afraid.

It's an ominous omen for GT5 later this year. Sure it'll have more cars and more tracks. But chances are it will have the same problems the GT franchise has always had, and that's simply not good enough. Couple that with the questionable frame rate and online problems and that could be disastrous.

I dearly love the GT franchise - I've had every one of them and I've been hoping and praying that they would one day fix the AI problems and the lack of car damage. If they've not done it on the PS3, then it's just never going to happen, and that is a sad indictment of Polyphony's marketing strategy. I've played this game a lot, desperately wanting to like it but I always put the controller down and am left with an empty feeling. It's just not exciting.

Over rated as a Game - vastly over rated as a Driving Simulator

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 16
Date: July 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is hyped for its great graphics. That should give anyone pause because graphics alone don't make a game. The highest definition pictures only extend to the scenes when you are NOT actually playing the game. Once you are driving ---- the graphics quality drops and while you still have very good graphics they are far from photo-realistic pictures you see elsewhere. (I'm using a HDTV, connected via HDMI, at 1080p)

The graphics you see when actually playing the game are good but far from stunning. As noted - graphics alone don't make a game anyway.

Another claim of this game is that it is a driving simulator. That claim is very questionable. At the basic settings you can do crazy things like hit your brakes at their maximum and still steer with relative ease. I'm sure that makes the game playable but not realistic.

If you even want to even approach a simulation you will need a steering wheel with gas/brake pedals. Logitech sells one for about $120 here on Amazon. The regular Playstation controller does not give you the finese to even approach a simulation. Still the physics seem odd even with a wheel and the game set at advanced physics settings.

On-line racing (the reason I purchased the game) is horrible. You can't meet up with a friends at all. Select a race and you'll be grouped with a bunch of strangers (no options - no on-line lobby). Play consists largely of each player trying to ram other players off the track. Even if you are not rammed off the track (which is very doubtful), you'll find you will lose the race because you have not mastered the art of crashing into barriers at high speed. Done right - you can smash into a guardrail at an insane speed and you'll pass all your opponents. In short: on-line racing consists of bumper cars and learning where to crash. As far as a simulation goes - online racing is a total failure.

If you are just looking for a game to play and aren't expecting much of a simulation this game may suit you. Like any game, you'll learn how to play it and I'm sure you'll then enjoy it. Playing bumper cars On-line may also suit many.

I was hoping for a game that simulated racing, paticularily on-line. In that sense Gran Turismo is an absolute failure.

Disappointing introduction to the franchise.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 30, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I've been a fan of racing games for a long time, and actually race in various forms of SCCA racing myself. I've raced high and low powered front and rear wheel drived cars and have learned a lot through competing and the various schools and classes I've attended. I had never played a Gran Turismo game prior to Prologue, having always had XBox or other consoles previously. I had heard so much about it that I didn't even bother with demos and simply bought the game the day it was available. Now having played it for several months all I have to say is I don't think I'll even consider buying the full GT5 whenever it makes it here.

My major gripes are as follows:
1) Atrocious game play layout
2) Poor physics
3) AI and damage are absolutely laughable.

To start with the game play is ridiculous. It reminds me of the old days of games where you do routines over and over and over to gain points/experience/money to buy the next level. The success you have in the races and your carrer mean little in GT5, only if you have the right car or not. You can breeze through each of the various classes by simply buying the right car. Buy the Ford Focus for C class and you cruise through... buy the GT-R for B class and you cruise right through. Buy the Ford GT for the A class and you cruise right through. The only hitch is the little added difficulty of the car specific races. So then you have to repeat races over and over to get enough money to buy the random extra cars. Disappointing, tedious and overall abysmal game play layout.

The online gameplay is even worse... it degrades into bumper cars with idiots and no penalties of meaning, and the pairing system and time from game to game is horrible! It is a very nice touch though that you can actually earn money racing online for your offline activities. That I thought was well though out and appreciable.

On to the physics. I've spent years learning to drive the right way and how to execute proper control. There are tricks of the trade on how to guide a car through certain types of corners and how to achieve certain handling. It simply does not exist in this game. Trail braking and various power on scenarios are not met with the appropriate vehicle responses. Additionally, vehicles with wildly different characteristics will handle nearly identical in this game. It doesn't matter what aids are or not enabled, or what level of physics you choose. Throttle on response was one of the poorest aspects I though in general, but turn in effects weren't far behind! Amazingly pathetic for a game that bills itself as a "the real driving simulator". It also appalling that in some cases the fastest way to execute part of a track is to bounce yourself off a fence or wall. I started doing it out of humor and was horrified to see it actually help in certain situations.

The AI and damage are really in that same vane. They do nothing, they don't exist, and it's all just superfluous featuring. Everyone else has covered these in other reviews, so no need to rehash the well known here.

All griping aside. The graphics are beautiful. The tracks are well rendered. The overall effects and feel of the game are beautiful. But as far as a driving experience and something fun to play... it just doesn't hold any allure in any way for me. Really a true disappointment on many levels from a franchise that I had always heard to be the best out there. There are already much better other racing games out there on the PS3 that I feel have given a lot better game play experience as well and while their physics engines aren't anything great either, at least they don't try to claim "simulation" and get at least a few things down better than GT5 even does even if they are less complete packages for the physics.

Feels like Ridge Racer...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Ok. Lets begin by...well, let just get right to it. Ridge Racer. Thats how this game feels to me.

I played Forza2 for about 8 months before it got old on me, but the way this is going probably 2 at most for prologue.

Its not just the lack of damage (which is a huge negative in my opinion), its the total feel of the game. Driving along and bumping into another driver or hitting a wall causes no driving change. The biggest thing is running off the track, getting in the grass. This causes you to slow down and spin. Thats it, spinning in the grass. Thats it.

However, as stated by the developer, the car detail is excellent. But, when I buy a racing game, being able to see highly detailed body panels is not as great as feeling like you are racing. Again, truley beautiful game. And the music between the loads is outstanding.

The demo, yes, I said it...and they should be ashamed for charging for it...could have just released over the PSN with 3 cars, two tracks, and waited to deliver a full finished product. My feeling is that this was released to create revenue for finishing this already outdated game. Sony should at least allow a cheap DL of the finished product to all the people who financed the completion of the game.

Pros: Music, detail.
Cons: Not finished (Damage, ability to practice, qualify, stats, etc.)

Finally, I have been playing the normal controller, maybe playing this game with a wheel would make all the difference. No, probably not. It would probably still feel like a simulator trying to be an arcade game or a arcade game trying to be a simulator. Hmmmmm....that is the question.

Gran Turismo 5

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 7
Date: May 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Well, i thought gt5 no its the best game for the cars, its a to simple game, i thougth exist better car games than gt5 for example need for speed pro street, the music, cars sounds and others things are better than gt5 so depends of you like but my it doesent fine.

Incomplete game = incomplte experience

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: May 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Positives:
Great graphics in solo play. Good sounds.

Negatives:
Online game-play is buggy and lags. Not many tracks. Difficult challenges need to be completed to have all options available.

I liked Burnout Paradise a lot more for on-line playing.

Looks good. Plays bad.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I agree with the review about the horrible AI and no car damage. To add to that, here are 3 more problems I had with this game.

1. Game progression. This game operates on a credit system where you have to win prize money in races to buy better cars. This is coupled with race events that are very particular about cars that you are allowed to use. There are races where all cars are permitted, but a good portion where you don't have any of the cars permitted. This means that you will end up racing the all-car events over and over again to get enough money to buy the cars to get into the specific-car events. Furthermore, race events are grouped into 3 classes depending on difficulty. The problem is that since you can't move into the next class without completing ALL races in the current class, you're further stuck in reracing certain events to buy the cars you need to race for EACH and EVERY event in a class before moving on. Kinda fascist if you think about it. Same thing for online racing. After playing for a night, I was still not able to compete online because I didn't own any of the cars allowed in any of the races. Frustrating to the nth degree.

2. This is more an extension of the no-damage complaint. When you drive by and hit a car, it sort of just slides around you. There are no spinouts or pileups. Feels like those old arcade racers on the Atari. They just go back on their predetermined track. That means winning a race consists of avoiding contact to maintain the highest top speed.

3. Perhaps the biggest problem: the cars just don't feel like they're going fast. Maybe it has to do with the graphics, the sound effects, or the handling. It pisses you off when your car overshoots a curve and spins out in the sand when it feels like you're not going that fast (despite what the speedometer tells you).

This effort just shows me that the designers were not of the right mindset when this game was made. Graphics and realism over gameplay and fun. One of the ugliest deaths for any well-intended game.

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