In GT3 (was that the first PS2 one?) anyway, I manag=ed to get a couple of gold licenses.

I'd tried them hundreds of times and managed to get nowhere near the time (i.e. seconds out) and then on one final attempt manage to beat it by half a second.

+1. I've been close to throwing my controller across the room.


This is the main problem for me. Let's say target times are 20.00 for gold, 22.00 for silver and 24.00 for bronze.
First time, I will get 22.50 seconds. Subsequent attempts mean I will get 22.005 or something. Finally, will get something like 21.00 seconds. Same with tests where I get silver first time. There are two tests on A-license where I am 0.005 seconds off gold! Really drives me nuts!

The most useful thing I picked up from the tests was the pace of the game. I've always been a fan of arcade racers, hence loved the NFS games. Powersliding even a pokey hatchback round corners was fun. Trying to do anything similar in this game results in a fail. The tests have been useful in "remapping" my brain, so I drive more slowly but accurately.

Just out of curiosity, what does everyone have as their controller setup and their view?

I've found using L2/R2 as brake/gas pedals meant I did a lot better, but eventually your right index finger hurts from squeezing the trigger for so long. Also, from arcade racing, I prefer viewing from behind the car, rather than front view or in-car view.

I haven't played since GT3 on the PS2 but...

R1 and L1 were manual gears up and down respectively.
X was Accelerate
O was brake
Square was handbrake
Triangle was change view (or look behind, can't remember).
Steering done on the stick thingy.

I really liked the PS2 as the buttons were analogue and one thing I managed to pick up was feathering the accelerator to get through the slow coreners as quickly as possible but without sliding the tail out.

Some of the models are better quality than others. I speak from experience as the Crossfire model looks like it’s been hacked out of a block of cheese with some wire. Nowhere near as nice as the real one sitting on the drive . I’ll grab some pictures later to compare with a few I did in GT4. I would not be surprised if they were using the same model data as in the previous version.

One bummer though - you can’t post replay videos to YouTube despite this being an announce feature earlier in the year. Bah! You’ll just have to imagine the heroic jump I did in a Dodge Challenger!

I did notice that you get a good choice of cars in the Used Car Section - all manner of models which are not in the New Car Dealerships.

FYI - my PSN username is hairydalek if you want to add me to your friends list.

EDIT - comparison pictures

GranTurismo 4 (PS2):


Gran Turoismo 5 (PS3):


The clue is in the side strakes and the door mirror. They both look the same, so I guess the older models have been used. I bet this is the difference between “standard” and “premium” cars in the game.

Anyway, why not post your own GT5 pictures? Could be fun.

+1. They created 200 new models - these are premium models, are higher quality and feature damage. The other models are just imports from GT5. It took them 5 years to create 200 models?!?! That means it took one person one week per model. I wish they had used double the number.

Saw some nasty screenshots today (might have been linked from CVG). Some very below par models with jaggy edges.

^^^Yup some of the models are IMO just crap. I was driving a Mini Cooper S through the cone slalom and the jaggies (incl the shadow) just distracted me. Not what I expected from GT5. I was hoping all of the models would be in their splendour.

This is linked in an article at Eurogamer (who gave the game 9/10). It can't be right. Can it?

Looks like there are some really bad standard versions

Not sure how you get screen grabs of gameplay myself.

One thing I have noticed is that the shadows are very pixellated in the actual driving part. At the start of a race, I see “holes” in shadows where there aren’t holes in cars. It was the first thing I noticed, and I thought: “five years?”. It seems that, as is normal for GT, the replays are of a better quality. At times it feels that it hasn’t really moved on from version 4 in any real way.

Apparently, they do intend to issue updates throughout the product’s life span, so I can only hope that they can address these things, and bring back the YouTube replay upload feature.

It wouldn't surprise me if the resolution of images was dynamically changed depending on the speed you are travelling in order to recover fps.

Not sure how you would get that screenshot though?

Looks like quite a few people have been commenting on how rank some of the standard cars look.

It's curious, the rear of that car seems to be really nicely rendered, but then clearly the side towards us isn't.
I wonder if there's some on-the-fly algorithm at work to optimise things for frame rates, an algorithm that clearly needs tuning...
Perhaps there'll be an update?

I wouldn't be surprised if they released it now to get it out in time for Christmas (and as it's been so long in the wait) and are probably working in the background on an update to resolve some things they didn't have time to get sorted.