As I waited for Gran Turismo 5: Prologue to load onto the borrowed PS3, I couldn’t help thinking that the line between PC and console sure is getting blurry. As the lengthy installation was followed by a number of abortive (but eventually successful) attempts to download a patch file, that formerly bright, stark line took on the blurry appearance of the lane markers at the bottom of the pool. This intrigued me, of course, because motor racing games are one of the primary reasons I still maintain to the spouse that I need a top-of-the-line PC in the house. I’ve always found console games to be deficient in a number of ways to their PC-based brethren, but I’m nothing if not open-minded and I’m always willing to refresh my BIOS, er… bias. Could this be it? Could this be the game that convinced me that there wasn’t enough difference between the two to justify the additional costs and hassles of maintaining a Vista box??

I suppose I ought to spell out my reasons for preferring the PC-based games over the console games as a precursor to the following discussion. First and foremost, it comes down to the controller. On the PC, there is a plethora of wheel/pedal options, up to and including my current set-up, Logitech’s fabulous G25 force feedback wheel. The separate H-gate shifter and the three pedal floor unit combine with the robust force feedback of the wheel to provide a very realistic driving simulation. Thumb sticks with their quarter inch throws and a collection of seemingly randomly placed buttons can’t come anywhere near the level of control that even a lower-cost wheel provides.

Close behind the controller in the list of console “weaknesses” comes the physics model. Once you get a good controller, you expect to be able to use it as you would with a real car. With a weak physics engine (and with physics calculations being very CPU intensive, that’s what you’d get with the formerly weaker processors of consoles) you don’t get realistic behavior. That’s a benefit, of course, if you’re limited to the default controller – if the driving behavior was too realistic, you wouldn’t be able to control it.



Finally, I’ve never been a fan of the structured game play of the consoles. The entire concept of unlocking cars and tracks offends me; I bought the game, why do I now need to “earn” the privilege of playing it the way I want to? Hey, I’m married – I’m used to acting like a trained seal jumping through flaming hoops to get what I want in real life – I don’t need a simulation of that, thank you very much. I much prefer being able to configure exactly the experience I’m looking for.

So, with that out of the way, what did I think of GT5:P? It’s close. It’s very, very close. I was able to score a few minutes on the 56” HDTV (flaming hoops having been successfully leapt through) to get started, and I think it was about halfway through the splash video when I IMed to Chuck that I was already on my sixth “Wow!” and having trouble retrieving my dropped jaw! Reviewers have been saying this since the days of Pong, but I’m going to do it anyway: the graphics are spectacular! I usually don’t watch the videos more than once, if that, but I went back and watched this one a couple of more times. Really, all I could say was “Wow!”

Of course, for quite awhile incredible graphics have been the biggest benefit of the consoles over the PCs. That’s always been kind of an empty, unfulfilled promise to me, though, since the actual driving experience in the first-person view invariably took the form of a couple of gau...