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I really want to like Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, but every time I warm up to it another aspect of it beats me down. I keep coming back hoping it gets better only to go away battered by design stupidity again and again. There's still a great series in here trying desperately to find its way 10 years after the original was released, but Prologue is just so unbalanced and riddled with problems that you're better off waiting and hoping the real Gran Turismo 5 will arrive next year.

There are reasons to fall in love with Prologue. It's got some of the most beautiful cars the world of driving games has ever seen. Ferrari, BMW, Ford, Honda, Subaru and plenty more have provided the license for you to drive over 70 of their collective lines of automobiles. All but a few have detailed interior modeling allowing you to finally sit inside as you fly around the High Speed Ring hard on the gas. It raises the immersion enough that Prologue really does feel like a revelation on those first few laps. Add in a new DualShock 3 controller, and the subtle rumbling really helps make the racing believable.

Looks are secondary to how the cars drive, and that's another place the game succeeds. The feel of most of the cars seems realistic, especially if you bump up to Professional handling. An '06 Corvette has a lot of horses under the hood for you to rein in, and without some help from traction control, you'll probably spend as much time recovering from a spin as you will ripping down a straight at nearly 200 mph. Unfortunately, the issue of driver aids is where things begin to break down.

Single-player progression requires increasingly powerful cars in order to move on. In the Level C challenges, top players will be able to drive with Professional handling and driver aids turned completely off. Even novices can get the hang of how these cars should handle on the road and still progress without a lot of help from the computer via driver aids. Once you hit the end of Level B and move into Level A, that all changes. Even a seasoned driver will have issues keeping the likes of a Ford GT on the road without turning on every driver aid.

Not only are the cars much harder to drive, the difficulty of the races seems tuned for unrealistic handling. You must use other cars as a wall to keep your speed up in the corners, drive at the edge of adhesion in a way you'd never be able to do without all the aids, and even then you'll have a hard time getting from 16th on the grid to third before three to five laps are completed. The game also sticks you in a single-file line for the start and begins the lap timer when the first car crosses start/finish, not when you get there. It's an absolutely ludicrous setup and will frustrate everyone who came for the driving, not the crashing.

Of course, in true Gran Turismo style there's no car damage, visible or otherwise, so often the best way to a quick lap time is to use glancing blows off the walls and hammer the throttle after the hit. As if expecting some of this, the game will occasionally penalize you for cutting a corner or ramming another car, but how the penalties are applied is entirely arbitrary. These penalties carry over to the online game, too, and without the online game your progression through the single-player game will be snail-like. You simply make more credits racing online than you ever will in the single-player game because the credit rewards are higher, but it's a complete disaster thanks to a terrible set of rules, awful enforcement and... well... people.