zerolight

Prologue gets a lot of things wrong. Flaky AI that needs a script to keep it on its toes. Screen tearing. Poor online. The fictional tracks have walls which you can bounce around without losing momentum if you are that way inclined. But the handling is near flawless. Driving on the raggedy edge hasn’t been this convincing since GPL. It’s the first racer since that old PC racer where I’ve struggled to maintain pace consistently over a three lap race, instead spinning out after one or two perfect on the limit laps. That’s a good thing. That’s realism. GT5 has that in spades. Punishingly so. Take the new GTR and push it to the limits on Suzuka to see what I mean.

Even that old school – start at the back and make your way to the front in three laps – gameplay is a good thing. Yes it masks the lacking AI, but it adds a challenge that requires you to, in most cases, push your car to the limit whilst avoiding slower traffic in the hope of making the top three at the end of the last lap. Forza races tend to be over after the first few corners so this alleged backwards step in GT5 suits me just fine. Do I want more? Of course, and I hope that over the next year the team find the time to deliver it. They need to take a long hard look at what Forza does right if they want to offer a compelling and complete package. For now though, GT5P is about as good as driving gets – virtually. Before the end of the year, DP has promised GT5P updates which will provide a realistic damage model to curb the wall riders, and a more complete online experience.

GT5P arrived in the post yesterday. This is the demo, if you like, for Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3 which is due out this time next year. A demo that you have to pay for. But at £20 it’s good value for money, giving you 5 or 6 tracks and 40 cars. Initial gripes aside (you have to install it, which takes 15 minutes, and then it asks you to download an update which takes hours) it’s very impressive.

I got a text from Roy last night, he was just about to head out the door to Ian when he thought to check his mail and discovered that the night had been cancelled. We promptly arranged an alternate venue, Roy’s place. I packed up the PS3 and GT5P, jumped into the GTI, and had a thrilling Badlands adventure through the Gorbals and Rutherglen en route to Roy. What a car.

Thankfully, on arriving at Roy’s we never bothered hooking the PS3 up to the internet, so were blissfully unaware that on detecting a network connection the PS3 would insist on spending hours downloading an update to GT5. Instead we waited the 15 to 20 minutes for the game to install (the PS3 is a PC it seems) before getting stuck in. Unsurprisingly, the first car I bought was a Golf GTI. Once we got to grips with the handling we were soon working our way through the career events, eventually completely class C several hours later. On the way we picked up an Integra and out of necessity, a Suzuki Capaccino. Surprisly, the Suzuki was quite pleasant to drive, insisting on sticking it’s tail out whenever possible. The Integra felt substantially faster than the Golf, yet hot lap times proved the Golf to be faster – 2 seconds quicker around the Suzuka East circuit. Phew.

The handling model is surprisingly good, very satisfying, without the understeer that plagued the GT series on the PS2. Roy certainly struggled to keep his car on the track for the first 10 minutes before he got a feel for it. GT5P looks and sounds very nice too. It’s a shame that the online mode is superficial, but hopefully that will improve. The tracks are of a high standard – Suzuka (in all three variants) and Fuji being my favourites, but the Daytona oval is suprisingly entertaining. Less appealing was the London track which PS3 fanboys have been holding up as eye candy – it’s a lame attempt to give PS3 owners the PGR experience. Eiger-what’s-it-called is as entertaining as ever – moreso now that you actually race other cars on it. So top stuff from GT5P then, and well worth the money, assuming you already have a PS3. Worth buying the console for? Maybe.

I’ve been pretty luke warm over the PS3 since getting one last March. A year on, and I’ve really only bought 3 games for it (excluding the odd PSN title). Of those games, the only two I kept are Colin McRae: Dirt and Motorstorm, both of which get occasional play, with Dirt being far better than the 360 effort. Two games. Occasional play. I’ve often worried that the PS3 was a waste of money, saved only by the Blu-Ray movie player that gets even less occasional use.

It looks like finally the PS3 outlook is improving. Sure, the pad is still a t*rd with deadzones bigger than my love handles, and the online service remains a joke. However there are a few games around the corner that I actually want to play. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue – an extended, paid for demo, but at £17.99 I think there’s enough in there to justify it. Everybody’s Golf – a fun golf game, who’d have thought it. Tried the demo, loved it, it’s a nice evolution of one of my favourite PSP games, so Tiger’s getting traded. Little Big Planet – still six months off, but it’s got huge potential. Metal Gear Solid – looks pretty good, but will the dual deadzone spoil the fun? Even The Agency has piqued my interest.

It’s been a golden year for gamers. I’ve bought, sold, played, and traded more games this year than I have in the past few years combined, across 3 platforms no less. There’s been some stellar games on the 360 and Wii, and some decent titles on the PS3.

Game of the Year

This has to go to Mario Galaxy on the Wii. It’s simply wonderful. I’ve gushed about this a few posts back, so I’ll not repeat myself.

Most Played

Forza 2 on the Xbox 360 has seen more gaming time than any other game this year. I’ll never tire of buying, upgrading, and tuning cars in an attempt to find that magic mix that turns a road car into an awesome racer. Best racer on any format, ever. More hardcore than PGR4, but more rewarding too. This was a close contender for Game of the Year.

Best Of The Rest

It may have taken an age to reach the 360, but Half Life 2, together with the rest of the Orange Box was worth the wait. A bigger draw than Halo 3, with a better single player campaign.

Runners Up

Fifa 2008 (360) was a big surprise, playing a better, more realistic game of football than PES this year, and having a stellar online mode. Skate (360) is an amazing re-invention of the Skateboarding game. Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS), and Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) are both wonderful RPGs that have swallowed up large portions of my gaming time. Metroid Prime 3 (Wii) has relegated Halo 3 (360) to the shelf in our house. Call of Duty 4 (360) and PGR4 (360) have both been a lot of fun. Tiger Woods ‘08 (360) is a great, if very tough Golf game. Wii Sports is over-hyped, but fun. And finally, Halo 3 (360) was disappointing. The initial wow of the single player campaign was replaced with a mighty yawn half way through, and I’ve only taken it online once – I hate it online, though I may be alone in that opinion. Oh, and a finially, finally… because I forgot about Motorstorm – eye candy aplenty in this rather nice off road racer for the PS3. Handling isn’t it’s strongest point, with it being a fairly generic flavour that favors third person camera’s, but the gameplay is almost a match for the graphics. I enjoyed it a lot for a few months earlier in the year, and it remains the only PS3 game I own.

It’s not a game I have any intention of buying, but I thought I’d download the demo on both 360 and PS3 to see how they stack up, after all, it pushes the hardware pretty hard. The result? The PS3 version had much more detailed textures, and had significantly better lighting. This was quite a surprise as I expected them to be much of a muchness. Control-wise the 360 version nudges ahead, the PS3 version’s triggers sometimes seemed to lag when firing your guns – this might just have been a problem with the demo build though. Aside from that, the famous Dual Shock dead zone wasn’t present – the PS3 game felt just as responsive as the 360 game and nowhere near as poor as Resistance: Fall of Man. Chock up a win to the PS3 then… which tends to suggest that the PS3 might end up with better versions of DiRT, PES, and GTA after all.