How Gran Turismo 5 brings Duran Duran and Aston Martins together
Gran Turismo 5 (2010)
Gran Turismo 5 (2010)
Oh, I do love racing games. I see them as one of gaming’s purest tests of skill; when they’re done right, playing them gives you a wonderful mixture of patience, focus and control. When done wrong, you get Crazy Frog Racer and Hello Kitty Karting.
Well, whatever poison you choose to play, it’s all about taking risks, keeping concentration, and outfoxing challenging opponents to get across the line first. And if you can’t do any of that, just spend the most money. Or if it’s Mario Kart, hang back at the start and wait for the top items, before goosing your pal, right at the finishing line. They are now no longer your pal.
If you somehow aren’t aware, the Gran Turismo series places an emphasis on realism, where you attempt to win races against cars of a similar type, or “drivetrain”, whatever that is. There are no grands prix or indeed any structured one-player mode based on points – instead you’re given several categories of racing competitions, which carry certain car requirements.
Examples in Gran Turismo 5 for PS3 include events for early 90s Japanese cars, 1960s supercars, European rally cars, even some really ghastly ones like French cars only. The variety is such that you’ll be swapping through your cars often, and buying in dozens of new additions to your burgeoning Garage that fit the bill.
More accurately, you’ll fancy the look of one of the categories and decide you want to enter, only to find that none of the rusted motors in your garage are eligible. No problem. You’ll head to the dealerships, either the official manufacturers like Toyota and Nissan, or the second-hand car dealer - disappointingly not represented by a Cockney villain in a sheepskin coat.
Having endured the gross and multiple loading times – you’ll be staring at the letters ‘GT’ for a nauseating amount of time - you’ll then enter the race with your new wheels, and find it to be decent, but not quite good enough for the rigours of serious competition, no matter how good a player you are. So you’ll go to tune your car up for that extra edge.
You will discover that, for absolute peanuts, you can bolt all kinds of turbochargers and gear shifting systems and rocket launchers onto any one of the games formidable tally of 1,000+ vehicles. You might not know what each upgrade does, you might not have even heard of a differential. I sure hadn’t. But so long as the brake horsepower and the Performance Points of your car increases, that’s all you’ll need to keep up with.
The anoraks among you may delve further into the car’s performance, adjusting her aerodynamics, fine-tuning her gears or fiddling with her brakes, all without getting one’s hands dirty. Yeah, if you didn’t know, every car identifies as female.
Having driven two cars in my life, one of them being very old and severely underpowered, in my life I couldn’t confidently tell you if these tiny engineering changes throw up a realistic effect.
But what’s important is that an impressive degree of customisation is available. All money spent is good money so long as the numbers go up, right? Even a simple change of the oil can transform your car from a laboured, clapped-out wagon to a dream-mobile.
Once you and your souped-up, high-speed deathmachine have returned to the track from which you retired in ignominy only minutes previously, you’ll most likely blister past the competition by the first turn. This is where the game’s difficulty becomes a bit skewed.
Of course, if you’re going to ram your car full of all sorts of modifications, the standardised AI cars will quickly become also-rans. Bringing a bit of difficulty back to the game requires some discipline on the part of the player. Tune up your car a bit, but not too much, and the challenge returns.
The trouble is that you’ll be swapping out your car of choice so often, as per the competition’s requirements, that you won’t want to waste the time making your car a fair contender. Far quicker to just buy a second-hand car on the cheap and boost its horsepower by a few hundred.
Then you’ll have to use some smart driving to beat the competition. Although, when I say smart driving, what I really mean is that you should outbrake yourself into most turns, and thrillingly use the other cars as a buffer so you can stay on track. There’s no damage model in these games, so get out there and smash ‘em up, that’s my motto.
This game’s middle name is variety, with a selection of over 1,000 cars and 70 tracks. Of those 70 tracks, several of them are simply night-time versions, which is a bit of a con. But at least some great real life ones like Spa-Francorchamps and Laguna Seca are in there. To the game’s great credit, there is huge diversity in the racing choices: you can choose to go kart racing, supercar racing, mini racing, NASCAR racing, Formula One racing, and more.
If those tracks lose their appeal, then you'll be kept happy with one of the best features of the game, the Course Maker. This Maker won’t give you full control over the track’s layout - no deathly F-Zero X style tracks that kill all competitors, unfortunately - but you can at least control the complexity and angle of turns over the track’s separate segments. It’s fun to see what shapes the game throws out.
The bulk of the game is the racing, ‘A-Spec’ mode. But the B-Spec mode, now that’s laughable. In this mode, you “manage a racing team”. What the game really means is: “watch your AI representative win”. Who wants to do that?!
It’s not management like F1 Manager or Football Manager - it’s just you sat there, looking at your pilchard driver going around the track. Throughout the race you can “manage” them to victory, which literally entails telling the hollow shell behind your car’s wheels to drive faster; imbeciles, or players of a more sporting disposition, can instead tell the driver to go slower.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because you’ve already been sneaky and applied all manner of modifications to your rocketcar. This ensures the race becomes a walkover, even if the clown you’ve put behind the wheel spins out frequently. You might as well just invite a friend over and watch them play, if you’re gonna do that.
The infamous Licence Tests also return, putting players in mini-scenarios such as turning a wet corner in as quick a time as possible. As ever, these events are sadistic in difficulty. Other than that, there’s the usual time trial and arcade modes for racers to enjoy.
The multiplayer was a much anticipated feature of this iteration of Gran Turismo. Locally, you are restricted to two-player split-screen, but at least it’s something. The online mode is now finito of course, but in its day it had 16-player races available. In my limited forays online, the other competitors were surprisingly fair, or close to it. It was a marked difference from the Turn 1 Slaughter that the online F1 games are notable for, I can tell you that.
The game’s graphics have been considered a bit of a mixed bag by those who demand a lifelike look at all times. I think they look the biz - even the less detailed, ‘Standard’ cars look fine, and the road, grass, gravel, tires and turn apexes all look fantastic, especially with the sun beating down upon them.
The luxurious attention to detail in Gran Turismo 5 is underappreciated but certainly not unnoticed by oafs like myself. I do experience some hefty screen tear, but I can handle that. Anyway, when you’re whizzing past them at top speed, does it matter that the spectators look like mannequins? Zoom out of Monaco’s famous tunnel in an Aston Martin DB9, and tell me that the game doesn’t look impressive to this day.
This is also one of those games which allows the player to play their own tunes instead of the game’s selections. That’s a great plus for me, having the ability to belt out Duran Duran from my Zonda as I slam through the streets of Rome. Custom music alongside the snazzy jazz music on the menus is a match made in heaven.
I have no idea if Gran Turismo 5 does what it sets out to do. A realistic driving simulator? Well, there are no cyclists on the tracks getting in your way, or taxi drivers and white van men doing what they want, so can it be that realistic, really? Well, whatever about that, this game is the closest I’ll ever get to drifting a Shelby Cobra around the Nordschleife - for that alone, GT5 will always be beautiful to me.
7 June 2024