Gran Turismo 5 – Casual Gaming?

Written by Craig Will Friday, 31 December 2010 06:00

Gran Turismo 5 has a billion cars, tracks, racing modes, and tuning options topped off with a level progression system; all this and you’ve got quite the time consuming game on your hands. Okay, not literally a billion cars, tracks and racing modes... Hyperbole aside, GT5 has more to offer than most standard RPGs these days; and it’s a racing game. All that said, this is the perfect game for casual gaming.

Before you start yelling at me about how I have no idea what I’m talking about, hear me out: I know absolutely nothing about cars. Everything I know about driving is what I learned by playing Need For Speed and Burnout. I’ve never done any sort of work on a car, I can’t even come close to naming different components under the hood. In other words, the finer points of the Gran Turismo series are lost on me, yet I love this game, it captivates me and puts me in a world I will never have the opportunity nor the ability to enter in the real world.

Why do I adore this game so? For starters, I can play for a half hour and still feel like I accomplished something, which is something a lot games with this sort of depth can’t offer; this makes the game very valuable to me as I don’t have a lot of extra time on my hands to dive into every epic game that comes out, as I’m sure most of you don’t. Another reason is the accessibility and the sense of pick up and play that this game offers. Enthusiasts may argue that there is much technical prowess needed to excel at the races, and if you want to come in first place on every race, that is absolutely true; but half the fun is learning the ropes and the license tests are fun, quick, and they add credits to your bank account and put healthy amounts of XP towards your level.

Races themselves are over relatively fast, at least at the lower levels, and not too difficult if you put some of your early credits into some tune ups – the tuning shop shows you how each different tweak will affect your car’s performance. I bought a used car and literally went through each tune up to see what the best ratio of cost to improvement for HP (the higher the better) and weight (the lower the better) was. Again, knowledgeable players can tell you why you may want to not improve the HP past a certain point or how to tweak your transmission to be more effective for cornering instead of powering down the straight-aways, but honestly I don’t care about that; I just like driving fast and watching my XP bar fill ever closer to the next level. It isn’t even necessary to come in first place to reap the rewards of credits and XP, which is perfect for someone like me who knew going in to this game that I wouldn’t win gold every time.

The absolute selling point though are the special events that unlock as you level up. These special events are similar to the license tests in that they have special rules and for the most part only last a minute or two. The first special event unlocked is the fabled kart racing and it’s a blast. In fact, all the special events are a lot of fun. So much so, that I’ve spent more time playing them instead of either the A-spec or B-spec modes combined.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every Farmville or Bejeweled player like my mom should run out and pick up Gran Turismo 5. It is rooted in realism and as such still requires some commitment to learning at least the layout of a console controller and perhaps some of the nuances of braking to take corners without spinning out (I have a lot of trouble with that) but anybody daunted by the thought of sitting through a car tuning simulator because they don’t know anything about cars, or anybody worried about needing over an hour to make any progress in the sea of content definitely needs to look into this game. Fun can be found five minutes at a time even if you’re not a gear head.