Drive, She Said

Though I generally like my video games to have a strong storyline and character development, I've always been a sucker for a good racing game. In the 80s, when I was a nipper, any holiday to Butlins for me was just an chance to beg my dad for some 20p pieces to have a blast on Out Run or Chase HQ.

What the arcade provided back then was far more colourful and high-octane thrills than could be had on your faithful Spectrum. The first racing game I remember was on the Speccy: Chequered Flag let you loose on a featureless track with no other drivers. Boring as hell, but cutting edge at the time. Later, we had gems like the conversions of Chase HQ and Stunt Car Racer to keep our inner speed demon satisfied.

But I digress. I always loved cars as a kid, so racing games were an obvious extension of that. To this day, I like my wheels, but have no idea how they work. All I know is that one pedal make car go faster, another make it slow down, the other change gear to help with the aforementioned two functions. So, as racing games have developed, so they have brought in the ability to tinker endlessly with gear ratios, brake management and all that guff.

Thankfully, we've also been given more arcade style racers to compensate. Out Run 2006: Coast2Coast on the Playstation 2 was an excellent updating of the classic format. More recently, both Burnout: Paradise and Midnight Club: Los Angeles have give me hours of racing fun, the latter especially due to it's 'real-world' cars and setting. They also took care to avoid any kind of in-depth story to the game, knowing the player just wants to drive very fast and dangerously. Need For Speed: Undercover hired actors to film cut-scenes to try and add some sense of drama to proceedings and fell flat on it's arse as a result: I don't care about ruthless mobsters and betrayal in a game like this. Just let me race a Porsche 911 at 150mph into oncoming traffic. Christina Milian did look lovely, though.

All of this is why I gave into temptation and tramped out into the ice yesterday to pick up Gran Turismo 5, a game that doesn't even bother with the pretext of a plot or any point except racing and getting more cars.

Initial impressions are that it looks amazing. It being some years since GT4 and while it doesn't seem an immediate quantum leap, the level of detail in the tracks shows just what the developers were doing all those times the release date was put back. Elsewhere, not much has changed about the core game, only that everything has been tweaked and worked on to make it better.

The addition of the Top Gear test track is a fun one too, especially when you're trying to race on it while driving a VW camper van that doesn't seem able to get about 60mph.

Where they have changed matters is a "level" system, where you gain points by doing well in races and earning new licenses. I can't quite see the point in this - I assume it's to make you go through the game 'properly' and to stop people spamming easy races until they get enough credit to buy the best cars.

The obvious flaw is the loading times, even after you spend an hour dumping a load of info onto your hard drive. Also, the music provided in game is a load of tosh, but that's purely a matter of taste and can be resolved by being able to select your own tunes, which is excellent but seems to take to feature a fatal bug that means the shuffle function doesn't work, meaning you have to manually pick a 'first' song everytime. Very, very annoying. Still, speeding down Le Mans in some fancy French sports car with Killing Joke's Love Like Blood in the background was a pleasing moment.

There was never any doubt that GT5 was going to sell by the ship-load and I'm sure Sony and the developers were overjoyed to get it into the shops before Christmas. I can't find a reason why this shouldn't be so: like it's predecessors, it's addictive playing and the realistic tone of the racing adds rather than takes away. I did find the go-karting very irritating, though - gimme monster trucks next time.