Digital Parsimony

So I went out and bought what is essentially the demo of Gran Turismo 5. It’s 10:00PM on a Sunday and I need a break from homework, so I pop in the disc. I get greeted with a message that says that the game must be installed on the system before play, so I hit install. The progress bar is moving at the pace of a sloth so I nab one of my dad’s PCWorld magazines. About 20 minutes later the game is installed, so I grab the controller and get ready to race. Now another box pops up, this time it wants me to download the latest version of the game and deploy an update. Fine, I hit “install” again and go turn on the coffee machine. About ten minutes later, I’m greeted by another little gray box that says “Download Failed”. Now I’ve been picking at my face and reading silly magazines for over 30 minutes! From then on, I hit “no” to a bunch of dialog screens to try and get to my $40 annoyance. After an hour of play, I’m not impressed. Sure, the graphics are pretty but most of the functionality of the game has disappeared. All your events are categorized very strangely, the “dealership” is packed with giant icons making it impossible to view cars quickly and efficiently. Go into a brand-name and you’re greeted with 2 random cars and a little optional window where I can preview the rest of the cars in a tiny little box. When I select the car, I can’t see it’s specs because they’re written in light gray on a white background and scrolling across the bottom at the speed of a coke-head’s heart rate. After every race I can’t move on to the next one, I have to exit the current event (taking me back to the main menu), then re-enter “events”, followed by selecting a class, and only then can I see where I can race next.

Anyway, the graphics are pretty and the physics are great, but the game just doesn’t work right and I still can’t get online, so the game’s dashboard assumes I live in Tokyo. It’s simply frustrating to play…and that might just be a deal-breaker.