Gran Turismo 5: hands-on preview

Sony’s latest instalment in the popular Gran Turismo racing game series is finally nearing completion. Honest.

Leet Games Blog was among the first to play Gran Turismo 5 on the Playstation 3 – here’s what we thought.

This year’s GT Academy has kicked off, giving gamers to chance to become a fully-fledged, real-life racing driver.

We were pit against other journalists in a time trial challenge around the Indianapolis Raceway driving a tuned Nissan 370Z – where the fastest laps would win bragging rights.

After setting an initial lap time of 1:47, we quickly managed to push this down to 1:44. We were in fourth place, just one second behind third spot.

Half an hour later and we hit 1:42, pushing us into third place – just two spots below the game’s creator, Kazunori Yamauchi (who placed a ridiculously fast time of 1:37). He was blatantly cheating.

However we were soon knocked into fourth place again, and after two more hours trying to find the perfect lap, we retired to the pits.

But the feeling of disappointment soon evaporated. Because Gran Turismo 5 also happens to be a very good game.

First things first – it looks absolutely incredible. It’s hard enough to differentiate between screenshots and pictures of real cars, let alone moving gameplay.

Thankfully GT5 more than lives up to expectations. Every car shines graphically, even down to minor details such as the rear lights and the alloy wheel spokes.

Play it on a high-definition TV and it looks even more realistic. It’s a notch better than the Xbox 360’s Forza 3, but only just.

The cars handle realistically, and there’s the ability to select traction control between 1 (loose handling) and 10 (lots of grip), or to turn it off completely.

Without traction control it’s easy to lose control of the car when cornering, but turn it up to the maximum and your car will slow down when turning, but regain more of its grip.

Gran Turismo 5 will be available for the Playstation 3 sometime in 2010 – Sony has still yet to announce a firm date.

But it’s looking like GT5 may just pip Forza 3 to the post and retain its crown as best racing game ever ™.

Check Leet Games Blog in the new year for our full review of Gran Turismo 5.