GT5: Prologue – first drive in the PS3 racer

GT5: Prologue features some headline-grabbing new additions, including a long-awaited online multi-player mode

The stunning Nissan GT-R was given its official UK debut but the real star of the show was the game.

Keith Collantine took GT5: Prologue for a spin.

View our Gran Turismo 5: Prologue slide show

We’d all like to have a garage the size of a football court stuffed with Ferraris, Aston Martins and the rest. But for most of us it’s never going to happen.

There are loads of computer games that let you assemble a virtual collection of the world’s finest cars and race them around the greatest racing circuits – but never before in so much detail.

The title that spawned this hugely popular sub-genre was the original Gran Turismo, which today is one of the biggest game franchises in the world.

Its latest incarnation, GT5, is a landmark game for Sony’s PlayStation 3 console as the electronics giant battles Microsoft’s Xbox 360 for gamers’ attention.

Xbox 360 owners have Forza Motorsport 2, Project Gotham Racing 4 and Test Drive Unlimited among others to re-create the action offered by Gran Turismo. But to ardent fans of the PlayStation classic these are all just pale imitations.

Getting behind the wheel of Gran Turismo 5 for the first time it’s clear producers Polyphony has moved the game forward again.

As with previous games, fans are teased with a ‘Prologue’ edition before the full game is released. This  features some of the headline-grabbing new additions (the Nissan GT-R, a pair of Ferraris, the London street track and long-awaited online multi-player mode) but only a small fraction of the content the final game will have.

Lets get the obvious point out of the way: GT5 looks impossibly pretty. With a large high-definition screen the colours are dazzlingly bright and sharp, and the effects, particularly the changes in lighting, are magnificent.

But the real appeal of Gran Turismo has always been its driving dynamics and sense of realism. GT5 feels a little trickier to get to grips with than its predecessor, and if you play it with a standard controller you’ll definitely need to turn the traction control up.

With a decent steering wheel set-up you get a better feel for how the car is moving around but it still leans more towards being a pick-up-and-play arcade racer than a proper simulation.

That said, you have to respect the gigantic amount of work that has gone into making the cars look, sound and handle realistically.

The team has also addressed one of the biggest flaws of the earlier games and increased the maximum number of cars on-track from a paltry six to a more respectable 16.

But I didn’t see much evidence that another bugbear of the earlier titles had been fixed – the computer cars still dumbly cling to a fixed racing line, don’t fight you for position, and thump into you if you dare to intrude on ‘their’ part of the track.

So is GT5: Prologue the real deal? Its certainly miles better than any other racing games currently available for the PlayStation 3. But its Xbox 360 won’t break into a sweat until the full-blooded GT5 arrives.

View our Gran Turismo 5: Prologue slide show

Do you own a PlayStation 3? Will you be buying Gran Turismo 5 Prologue? Have your say on the Auto Trader blog.