14 DAY TRIAL // Gran Turismo 5 is the long-awaited racing simulation title created by Polyphony Digital and published by Sony which has finally been released on November 24 and allows gamers to experience a wide variety of events, from karting to NASCAR and traditional city and circuit races with more than 1,000 vehicles.
Around the time I got to level 9, I hit a hard brick wall in Gran Turismo 5, metaphorically speaking.
In the virtual world I was mostly hitting barriers in the Alps and at Monza while trying to win a muscle car race and an alpine one in order to get the money and the levels needed to progress in my career.
Then I decided to leave the normal races aside and blitz through the Special events which had opened up.
Karting was a grating experience at first, with its short loop tracks and its weird mechanics, where the vehicles slid on the road as if they were on ice; but after a while and after moving beyond the beginner races, it's a joy to compete in the kart races and enjoy the fact that spins can happen and that a race can be won after such a catastrophic event.
Karting will not be fun the first time around the track, but it grows on the gamer and has become one of my favorite modes to blow off the irritation created by other races.
I then went to the NASCAR events only to discover that managing the speed of my pretty jagged car while cautiously turning left all the time was not my idea of fun, especially with the pretty punishing time limits set by the developers at Polyphony Digital.
Similarly annoying are the two events I have tried on the Top Gear test track.
The recreation is faithful to what gamers can see on the TV show, but there are so many limitations and the vehicles are so poorly chosen that all the fun is sucked out of the concept.
Something built around time trials and an ever-changing cast of cars would have been a better idea.