Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3)

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Ten years of Gran Turismo and the popularity of NASCAR have trained many U.S. gear monkeys to believe that running into other cars is how you drive fast. There is no such thing as respect in an online race, and with Internet latency adding to this already nasty mental condition, it makes the one feature for which people would pay a complete bust.

You will be crashed out of the lead every time because you can't escape the morons barreling into slow corners without braking, using your bumper as their stopping power. This doesn't penalize them in any significant way -- a four-second "slowdown" at most -- so they're right there next to you after you recover from the crash, ready to shove you aside with a quick flick of their steering wheel toward your car. Once again, no penalty applies to them, but heck, you might get a penalty for ramming or hitting the barrier too hard! Anger sets in and you decide to go back to the single-player only to realize you need another 100,000 credits for a specific car to compete in a certain event and the best way to earn that is to go back online and pray you can get a second or third without too much trouble.

So there you are, on the seesaw of single-player and online racing, wanting more cars but finding it nearly impossible to enjoy the time spent earning the credits for them. If the racing against the artificial intelligence were more than just "pass these 16 cars in five laps," it might hold your interest long enough to race the same races again and again, but the game wears out its welcome all too quickly. Combine the shoddy racing with a whole load of menus that slow the entire experience to a crawl, and there's just nothing left to recommend.

To top it off, there are bugs. Music tracks have a mind of their own -- sometimes they play during races, sometimes they don't. In my first race I heard Thin Lizzy's "The Rocker." I haven't heard it in over a hundred races since, making me wonder if I'm just dreaming that I heard it at all. Graphic glitches abound. I had everything from screen tearing to nasty aliasing to slowdown. The aforementioned lap timer starting when the first car crosses the line and not when you get there is another obvious gaffe. It's like this entire product is a work in progress, and that's been pretty much confirmed by some recent rumblings of a damage model being added in a patch.

I've played hundreds of racing games. Gran Turismo made me a believer in PlayStation again when it shipped in 1998. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will either be the place the series officially jumped the shark or it'll be the work-in-progress demo that they shouldn't have released before Gran Turismo 5 arrives next year and restores my faith in the series. Fans of the games can probably enjoy this in spite of its flaws, and if the only reason you buy GT is to race against the clock, you'll be in heaven. We already got the time-trial version of GT when Gran Turismo HD was given away a while back, and this certainly looks a lot nicer than that, but while it's nice to have a few more circuits on which to drive, it's hardly worth 40 bucks.