Gran Turismo 5: Driving Force

Spoiler warning: Some cars in Gran Turismo 5 may come fitted with spoilers. You can also fit spoilers to pretty much any car in the Maintenance section.

I’ve played every major version of Gran Turismo to date, including Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Gran Turismo for PSP (but not for very long). Every time, it’s roughly the same story: I enter GT Mode, start completing license tests, buy my first car, and slowly work my way up to the pro leagues until finally, somewhere before I’ve completed every race series, I decide I’ve had enough Gran Turismo for another year and never come back. What “enough Gran Turismo” means, of course, varies from year to year.

I did permanent damage to my Playstation’s disc drive from leaving it on overnight so I wouldn’t lose my Gran Turismo 2 progress; I’d bought the game but neglected to purchase a memory card. For some reason this wasn’t an issue with Gran Turismo 1, but I wanted to make a serious run at the sequel, so the PSX stayed on until I finally bought a card a few days later. Gran Turismo 3 was the reason I bought a Playstation 2, several years after that console’s release; I played a significant portion of it, but it was nothing compared to my obsession with Gran Turismo 4. During grad school, I played through an entire year’s worth of races in the game, and then decided I needed to build a compendium of all the used cars in GT4, along with what days they were available in the used car lots, what colours they came in, and what mileage you could expect on the odometer. I think I still have a copy of the SQL database containing all those stats somewhere.

Gran Turismo 5, however, is a completely different experience for two reasons. One, it’s the first Gran Turismo I’ve played with a proper steering wheel setup, so in essence I’m learning to drive and race all over again. Two, I no longer have reams of free time to spend on the game; GT5 must be rationed piecemeal, divided into hour-long morsels to be digested in the hour before bedtime. Clearly, any enterprise on the order of a used car compendium is impossible, but more than that, significant portions of the Gran Turismo experience change drastically under the new time constraints. I have three examples that illustrate the problems that result.

The first example involves the Honda Beat, a tiny Kei-car convertible available only in Japan back in the early 90s. Unlike nearly every other racing game on the planet, Gran Turismo not only acknowledges the existence of cars slower than a Honda Civic, it practically celebrates them. How else to explain Polyphony’s inclusion of quirky and cute cars like the Honda Today, the Subaru 360, the Suzuki Cappuccino and the impossible-to-hate Daihatsu Midget II? Most of these cars drive pretty much the way you’d expect any tiny car with a 63hp engine to drive—they’re sluggish to accelerate, quick to slow in the face of a slight hill or a light breeze, and happy to understeer if you manage to reach their rather low top speeds. But not the Honda Beat, which has the distinction of being one of the very few mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive Kei cars in existence. Anyone who’s spent time playing any sort of sim racer knows that MR cars can be trouble. Unfortunately, I forgot the Beat was an MR car; moreover, I didn’t expect a Kei car could give me so much trouble, not when I’d just dominated the Sunday Cup, FF Challenge and World Compact Car Championships with my trusty stock Honda Civic.

I took the Honda Beat to the first race of the Lightweight Cup expecting victory. Instead, I punted and restarted on Autumn Ring Mini something like 50 times, finishing the race exactly once. The other 49 times, I managed to spin out at one point or another, often before I could get even a single lap in; eventually, I placed a dismal fourth place after spending half an hour trying to gently coax the Beat around corners at anything close to the speed of the other cars. The Beat punishes anyone with a lead foot extremely harshly, and the slightest loss of grip can send the car into an unrecoverable spin. At best, you’ll skid across the track harmlessly, but scrub off most of your speed in the process, killing your chances at a podium finish. After my thorough humiliation at the wheel of the diminutive Honda, I bought myself a Daihatsu Copen and promptly finished second on my first try around the track. An easy victory came on the second attempt.

The second example is the first Top Gear test track challenge, which involves driving a VW minibus against other minibuses twice around the test track. The VW minibus is even more sluggish to accelerate and more stubborn where corners are involved, but at least you can’t spin them out. They are, however, massive, which makes all the other minibuses on the track a major nuisance. With the track narrowly defined by lines of cones, it becomes nearly impossible to pass other vans at chokepoints on the track; hit one cone or the grass and you’re disqualified. Again, I had to restart the challenge several times because of one costly mistake trying to pass a set of vans, and each restart cost me a good two minutes thanks to how long it would take for a minivan to complete a lap.

Finally, there’s the AMG Driving School challenge, where you take a lovely Mercedes SL300 gullwing around various sections of the Nurburgring. Actually, I don’t really need to tell you how this turned out because you can probably already guess: every time I failed to make the silver cup, or every time I crashed out on the course, thus ruining my time, I had to restart the track from the beginning and try again. The common link should be obvious by now: Gran Turismo 5 steals your life from you, three minutes at a time. And where once I might have been a willing, even eager participant in this sort of thing, now I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I would love to learn how to properly drive a Honda Beat, or get golds on all my B-license tests, or perfect my line through the high-speed chicane at the end of the Nurburgring. On the other hand, I need to go to work tomorrow, and I can’t afford too many hour-long experiments where I figure one of these things out.

Forza 3 had a great solution to all this: it’s called the rewind button. Gran Turismo 5 and its fanbase has staked out the hardcore console sim territory, and so will likely bemoan this impure addition to Forza’s repertoire as an unnecessary concession to casual drivers. And they’re right, except for the “unnecessary” part. Gran Turismo will break your balls until you get it right, which is the right formula for breeding perfect drivers. But is it fun? I’m torn between really enjoying the challenge of getting things just right on the one hand, and always keeping an eye on the clock to see how much time I have left before I need to turn off the PS3 on the other hand. Do I try this challenge one more time, or accept my silver and move on?

Forza 3’s problem is that it is, in some ways, too streamlined an experience; the joy of learning how to tune your car mostly disappears thanks to the quick-tune option and the class system, and the season play option restricts your choice of events too much. But Gran Turismo 5 has the opposite problem. Everything from the game’s UI to the uneasy split between standard and premium car models to the core principles that make a rewind function anathema point to the same basic problem: too much sprawl. Where Forza tends towards minimalism, GT5 tends towards maximalism, emphasizing its wealth of features, cars, race types and colourful UI buttons over any sort of concession to the user’s patience. It’s not a fatal flaw by any means; if I were still in high school, I would wholeheartedly embrace GT5’s approach. I might still, if I can just find the time.

[This article, sans images, originally appeared on Wesley’s Dear Game Diary tumblr]