Teasing The Real Driving Simulator... Quick Hands-On with the Gran Turismo 5 Time Trial Demo

Well, it should be out on the U.S. Playstation Store by the time you read this, but I have messing around with the Japanese version of the Gran Turismo 5 Time Trial Demo, or as Polyphony Digital calls it the GT Academy Time Trial Challenge. This seems to be a limited demo as they will times until sometime next month, but we finally get to test drive a little tease of what is come with Gran Turismo 5. There is only one track and one car (of two variations) in this small demo of about 200 MBs. Surely, this is some early stuff as I don't think some of the features GT5 is heavily promoting is in this demo like car damage (or I haven't checked the options). It is only the car, the Indianapolis Road Course, time trial, leaderboards, and replays. At least the time trial is unlimited in which you can take as many laps as you want with the Nissan 370z (either normal or tuned). In terms of how it plays, it controls like Gran Turismo with x being the accelerate and square being the brake as if it might be hard to adjust back to that style of controls if you have been playing racers on the Xbox 360 like Forza Motorsport 3. Of course, steering wheel controllers are supported as well if you truly want that real experience. Basically, it is the Gran Turismo you know and love for more than a decade as I didn't notice any drastic changes to the gameplay other than the default racing line introduced in Prologue, which can be turned off. As I mentioned before, this time trial demo is pretty much a challenge to find the fastest times per country as leaderboards and demos are separated by location. As far as the graphics go, this is only the beginning of how much potential GT5 can get with the realism from the track design, the cockpit view, having an actual human driving, and so on. Gran Turismo 5 is expected to come out here in the States in the summer of 2010 and good thing this teaser is out there for us to try out to ease the long wait, but so far, I'm liking it even though it remains to be seen how huge everything else will be.