GT5 being released was headline news though I wasn't clear if it's released everywhere yet. Has anyone got it, and can do a mini-review?

If you do would you please say what kind of racing game fan you are - hardcore sim, serious but don't mess about with car tuning, casual, etc, since GT5 tries to cover a lot of bases.

Personally I have little interest in tuning my car, I want to do races with overtaking in different conditions but not get into that level of detail.

I think I've read a Yahoo review regarding GT5 that unless you're a car nut, it will be boring. they say it's like playing ball with a group of physicist - you want to have fun but they want to know the math on how it bounce.

Most people have liked it so far...although I've read the same thing about the game that FableFox read, it's pretty damned realistic. There are some hitches here and there, from what I've read, though it seems like nothing too huge.

Realistic doesn't have to mean boring though... in real life cars look pretty fun to drive fast.

Quote:

Original post by d000hg Realistic doesn't have to mean boring though... in real life cars look pretty fun to drive fast.

Yeah, even crappy cars can be fun to drive fast; take a look at 24 Hours of Lemons or Chump Car.

Both of those would make a pretty crappy video game, but they're incredibly popular in real life.

[edit] However, 'realistic' racing games require more car control skills and are more difficult for casual gamers.

I've had it for 2 days now and i'll try and sum up my impression.

Firstly, the loading times, ugh. There is an initial install which is 50 minutes or so and then whenever you load a car or a track for the first time it takes a while and then saves that locally too. So quite what it saved to disc the very first time i don't know. The UI is pretty nice though you can't skip through screens as fast as i would like. Most screens do some graphics building up for about 2 or 3 seconds and the GUI is unresponsive during this time.

You can't buy most of the 1000 cars from premium dealers that are claimed to be in game. You either have to win them from cups or wait for them to turn up at the second hand dealers.

If you don't have a car type that you need for a specific cup then its incredibly annoying trying to work out what car to buy. It gives you the same spec requirements but there is no way of browsing the garage while also know what cars are viable. So you end up going back and forth alot.

The racing visuals are nice, no better than the Prologue i don't think, which was a bit disappointing. The shadows are shadow mapped that show the jagged edges a lot. I was also disappointed in the surroundings of the tracks. They have thrown most of the geometry budget at the cars it seems while everything else is very obviously flat and barely looks normal mapped or 3d at all.

Some other little notes, alot of the top end cars in the premium dealers don't have all of the stats (there is about 8) filled out which is disappointing. The NPC AI also appears unchanged from the old GTs. The races are too easy, so far i've not lost one and im on the amateur series. This is simply because you can just bung a turbo on a car and out do everyone on the straights.

Thats it i think!

No wonder the review I've read conclude it as 10/10 simulation inside a 5/10 game and they give it a score of 8.5/10 I think. While they didn't elaborate much on this, they just said that the developer focus too much on the sim side but not on the game(play).

Had a quick go of it last night. I only played a few arcade races though, so didn't get a feel for the extended gameplay.

As an occasional Forza/NFS player:
The racing sim is very good, but somehow the sense of speed is lacking -- at 100mph you only feel like you're going 50mph.

As a graphics programmer:
Cars are very pretty, except for the shadows, which are inconsistent -- sometimes shadows look great, other times theres huge amounts of aliasing (jaggies). Even my non-technical friends were at times saying "WTF is with the shadows there".

Everything except for the cars/road looks horrible. The environments are extremely low poly, the ground is lacking texture blends between material types, the textures are low res and the tiling/repetition is extremely noticeable, the fact that the trees are 2d cut-outs is painfully obvious, spectators look as you'd expect them to (i.e. bad if you stop near them)... Overall I'd describe the visuals as "inconsistent".