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.

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.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.