Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Gran Turismo 5 - Impression Right Out of the Box

So Gamestop offered a 50% mark up on trade ins toward a preowned game for power reward members. I've been finishing off games, so I called around and found Gran Turismo 5 preowned and traded 6 games in with $10 added to my card. Woo Hoo!!!

Throw the game in the system and the first thing to do is install an update, which I knew about, so ran that. That gets done and then it pops up asking me to install it to the Playstation 3 hard drive. Well, I do plan to play it a lot and will own it a while, so yea, sure, do it. When that finally gets done, I have to go through and answer more questions, pick a track suit that I'm never ever going to be able to change in the game, which is just stupid. I'm finally able to go and buy my first car to race with. Let me put all that in perspective for you. All that took me 1.5 hours to do before I could even play the game. Needless to say, I was ready to do something.

So what car do I buy first. I don't, I buy a go kart and race a special cup event. The go karts are pretty fun and you can spin out pretty easy if you're not being somewhat careful driving them. So I finish off the event and race until I get to level 3 with some more money. I then finally go and buy me car to race with.

However, before I do that, I go to the license area and see what that's all about. It takes you through the basic of how to drive the car and do everything in the game. I did the first 2 and got gold. Figured I'd go race as I'm ready to race some by now.

I can't really describe how this is different from Forza 2 since I haven't played Forza 3 yet but the game is different. I knew the tracks I was racing on but they drove and felt completely different. They seemed shorter and had higher banks in the Forza game where they are stretched out and flat in Gran Truismo.

Another main aspect which is another reason I wanted the game is the right thumbstick is your gas and brake. Push up to go and push down to break. Now the X is gas and O is brake as well. I would not suggest using them though as I used the stick to begin with and then tried the buttons. When you press a button, it's a hard hit of go or stop. When you let go of the stick or push it down to break, it slows it down properly instead actually locking the tires up. It really helps you drive the car a lot better. The next step will be to buy a steering wheel to use in the game.

After winning some events and winning some cars, I noticed they were not in my garage. There is a truck on your screen and it had 3 on it for me. Clicked on it and their are cards in it. Clicked on the first one and it delivered my car. I don't understand why I have to click on a truck to get a car when it should just go straight to my garage. Plus you have to watch it drive in from the dark with only seeing its head lights until it comes into full view. I just started the game and that has gotten old fast and I only have 5 cars. It happens when you straight out buy a car as well. You have to own over 1000 cars in the game for a trophy. I'm sorry but I really want a way to turn that off. It's just annoying.

I then went back to doing the license test and when I got to the 5th part of the test, I could not get gold. I can not hit the brakes and take a turn coming out flying without sliding off the road or stopping dead. The few times I did do a good turn and got through it, I was over the gold medal time by 20-30 seconds. This happened on the next 4 of the tests. It's definitely not going to be easy to get gold in, that's for sure. I'm sure they will only get harder as there are 6 different tests in the game for different licenses.

Another aspect of the game is the load times. I feel like I'm back on an old PS2 because it takes so long to load up a track to race on it. On top of that, it says it's installing it everytime. Why are you installing a track when I installed everything to the console already. Loading is one thing but installing it on every track I race. Either the wording is wrong or if they are installing everytime like it says, which would be just ridicilous. Why did I bother loading it to my PS3 then?

There is a lot of options to pick through on the menu. Some are large, some are small and some look like icons. It's easy to tell what is what on the screen by the name or putting the pointer over it to get the text to pop up on what it is. You might not know where to go though in order to get where you want. So it's kinda messy as you don't know how to navigate around until you've dived into every screen and learned everything on the menu so you know what each sections offers.

Overall, the game was enjoyable and I made it to rank 6 before I quit playing last night. I did upgrade my car last night before I got off though so the next time I race, my car should be booking it down the track. I'm sure the game will get better and I'm sure I'll find some other bad part as well. When I get a good list, I'll let you know later on what I get out of the game.