Gran Turismo 5

Gran Turismo was always the console racer king, other series such as Sega GT, Enthusia and Forza Motorsport tried to challenge it but none of them came close in terms of impact. 2004's Gran Turismo 4 had heaps of content all at the same high level of quality. With GT5 it seems they bit off more than they could chew. They wanted over 1000 cars and over 70 tracks and while they achieved this, they did so with huge comprise.

The vast majority of cars in the game were direct ports of Gran Turismo 4 models, which stood out like a sore thumb with their low poly counts and non existent cockpit view. Likewise many of the tracks in the game were GT4 ports with no improvement except the GT5 lighting engine. For how long the game took to come out this was simply nowhere near the standard that the previous games had set. By this point the famous career progression of Gran Turismo had gotten a little stale, with GT5 they didn't really rectify this in any way, they had seasonal events which were updated every so often but overall it was more of the same. They also made the License tests almost pointless, as they were not required to enter events.

Gran Turismo 5 could still an excellent game if you set everything up properly to show the game at it's best. Set up dynamic TOD/weather Nurburgring in a premium car with a decent wheel, in 720p mode for a more stable 60fps and 4xMSAA and the game is absolutely brilliant. Though going from that to racing on Trial Mountain and seeing PS2 cars racing around you is a pretty startling difference. I won't call GT5 a bad GT game but it's missing the high bar of consistency that the previous games in the series had.

Gran Turismo 6 was sadly more of the same. The physics were better than ever and the "Standard cars" were slightly improved but the consistency was still all over the shop. Hopefully GT Sport is the refresher this series truly needs, but I feel the glory days of Gran Turismo are in the rear view mirror.