Taxing the faithful to pay for another year of development... Good old Sony.
Lets be blunt… this is a demo.
A big demo I grant you but a demo nonetheless.
They may be calling it a "Prologue" but you can call a fork a cabbage… its still a fork… this is a still a demo, or if you prefer a "tax" on game development, they can't afford the funds to keep this development for another year so they've decided to charge you to play the demo.
It's a demo because of the simple fact that everything we have here will be included in the final product, we are being charged for a chance to play part of the main game… if buying this got you a discount on the full game then that might be an excuse… but we're not.
When they finally get round to releasing the full game we'll be charged again for content we already have, as you can download this as well, it makes all those Sony fanboys seem somewhat hypocritical when they berate the charges for downloading content on Xbox Live, nothing on there ever weighed in at such a steep price… certainly not any demos.
Onto the demo itself they still haven't seen fit to beef up the driver AI, the CPU controlled drivers still pootle along the racing line at a steady speed, they still act as if they are there purely to act as moving obstacles rather than any sort of competition.
Nor have they decided to include any penalties for appalling driving, on time trials you can speed around, bouncing of the barriers safe in the knowledge that you won't be penalised at all.
Sort of makes the whole claim that Gran Turismo is a "Simulator" look shallow.
Again they've made sure that you can alter practically every setting on your car… in fact its possible to spend more time tinkering with the set up, gear ratio, spoiler angle and everything else, than you do actually driving the race… they've even made it so you can change some of these setting mid race… something else which makes a farce of the "Simulation" claim.
Sure it looks good, and the fanboys will claim it's the best looking thing ever… or at least since the last PS3 game they claimed was the best looking thing ever, but gameplay wise they really haven't moved on from the original PlayStation game and that's immensely disappointing, all the extra power of the PS3 seems to have been directed in making the game look good rather than play better than its PS2 predecessor.
If you want a game that looks good, and you feel you've already waited long enough to play without having to face up to another year of no Gran Turismo, then by all means buy this… you'll effectively be paying to fund the extra year of development that they intend to put into the game… lets hope that when the full game comes out its worth it… though I doubt it.