Grand Turismo 5: Of all the studios that were showing racing titles, only Sony chose to showcase their new game properly — with a racing wheel and pedals. As a result, the entire SimHQ staff were drawn to the Sony PS3 mega-display like flies to, well, stuff.
Chunx was first up. After confirming with the Sony assistant that he could turn off the game's driving aids and set the physics to it's most realistic level, he took a seat in their sim cockpit and selected a Japan Super GT 500 Nismo GTR race car for a trip around the Nurburgring GP circuit. Every sim cockpit in the Sony display was equipped with a Logitech Driving Force GT wheel and pedals.
The car felt and drove as expected, demonstrating understeer, oversteer and power-on oversteer in an intuitive way. Although the physics engine of GT 5 has been extensively reworked since GT5-Prologue was released, the game still had a too-faint feel to the force feedback repsonse and wheel resistance. Entering the short back stretch of the GP circuit, the game abruptly shut off and defaulted back to the user interface. The assistant explained that the game demo was designed to run only for 2 minutes — too short a time to complete a lap at any road course on display, and certainly too short of a time to develop much of an opinion about the game.
Joe, guod, and Chipwich also got some seat time with GT5, but ConManly got to try out the game's Rally Cars on a gravel road. Having RBR and DiRT2 to compare it to, he felt that GT5's physics seemed to do a good job replicating this form of racing, although once again the feedback and resistance seemed to be a bit weak. Those of us with higher-end racing controllers such as the G27 and Fanatec PWTS or GT3RS were a bit underwhelmed by the DFGT, but that's not an issue for the game itself. We just hoped that the force feedback response on those products would be a bit more robust.
What little we did see of GT5 was impressive — particularly the graphics and car variety, and certainly seems to have physics and eye candy on a par with GT 5's main rival, Forza Motorsport 3. But GT5 has many game elements that set it above the bar raised last year by FM3, mostly due to limitations of the Xbox360 platform. In GT5, multiplayer races can host upwards of 30 participants, far more than the eight in FM3. And GT5 also boasts day/night transitions, something not available in FM3. It also has a wider variety of track surfaces, including gravel rally roads. While we wish GT5 had more robust force feedback effects strength, it does seem like a worthy simulation product, as far as we could tell. We expect that this game will sell many new PS3 boxes for Sony.
I think they'll debut the new cars at Road America, but I'm not sure.
