Gran Turismo 5 Academy

Posted by Kevin in Featured, Previews, Sony | 2 comments

When Sony said there would be a preview of the GT5 Academy demo (due on the 17th for everyone with a PS3) I jumped for joy. I would never camp out for a video game, but at the risk of sounding like a total fanboy, I would probably camp out for GT.

The tuned car looks lovely

This preview is much like the GT academy that ran during the Prologue press campaign, where Sony and Polyphony go to the virtual driving world to find a series of drivers worthy of their time, and money, to travel the world with a Playstation-branded Nissan team driving races globally.

Last year, PlayStation and Nissan’s GT Academy transformed the life of Spanish student Lucas Ordoñez, who entered the GT Academy and emerged a fully fledged member of the Nissan race team, winning his spurs at the Dubai 24H. This is your chance to follow his steps as a virtual-to-real racecar driver. This is your chance to join him. Download the Gran Turismo 5 time trial on December 17 and try to beat the clock. Your best time will be uploaded to a national leaderboard – and you can keep improving it, again and again, until the demo is taken down in late January. When that happens, the 20 fastest drivers will be invited to a national final, where they’ll race head-to-head on Gran Turismo 5 and undergo a series of aptitude tests. From there, the winners will be taken to Silverstone, where they’ll get behind the wheel of a Nissan 370Z for real as part of 2010’s GT Academy.

The car in question is the same this time around, a Nissan 370Z. The demo offers two options, a standard 370Z and a tuned one, both to take out in a time trial on the Indianapolis road circuit.

Menu system is rather like the PSP one

The car, for people who’ve played with it in video games before, is jerky, jittery and a lot of fun, but hard to stick to the track when accelerating from tight corners. Which is why they chose this circuit, no doubt. Plenty of corners to throw the driver off track. While it is a lot of fun, it’s frustrating to see the number 1 time of Yamamuchi on each car being set so high. My best time in the tuned car (granted, my second lap in total) was 1:47, which put me over 10 seconds behind the GT creators time. However, I was the second person in the world with my time. Which says either I’m great or that proper talented drivers hadn’t jumped on.

The demo is using the GT5 engine, which feels flawless. Sadly no damage is found in this demo, likely because it’s not there to be a game but rather a test to find real world drivers. The car jerks and moves exactly as you would expect, and is best experienced with the cockpit-view. No head tracking is available via eyetoy here either, undoubtedly being saved for a later date to show off. It feels like it should, brilliant. Looks superb as per usual, but also feels like it would benefit greatly from usage of a steering wheel setup.

The menu system is familiar territory, but uses the GT: Portable system with more bouncy graphics to show information rather then the sleek, clean style shown in Prologue. The menu works well but in this case, is dog slow. This is probably due to the system consistently updating online ranking data, but if I was the only one who set a time so far, and the system was still incredibly slow, I cannot imagine how slow it will get when it’s unleashed to the public in a few days.

One car, two flavours, one track.

All in all this is a great experience, but people will be disappointed because the demo isn’t a demo per se, more a trial for Nissan and Sony to find fledgling drivers through their simulator. No crash damage, head tracking or other cars to race with will make some shout and complain online when in reality, that was never the purpose of this. They just want to remind you that they’re the best at making a driving game, and also that their full product is “coming soon”.

As said before, the full demo arrives to PSN on Thursday.