Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Rip off or Not

By Philip Dunkley

Gavin and I were recently chatting over a few beers, and the conversation came up about GT5: Prologue. Now we all know what Gavin’s opinion of this is, but I thought that it really needed a little sprucing up and a more in-depth look at exactly what a person gets for R399.00.

Firstly, the game is a glorified demo, and it’s a showpiece for what is to come in the full game, but then hell, it’s one heck of a demo. People have said that there is as much content as Motostorm in Prologue. I tend to disagree; there is a lot more content in Prologue, and a hell of a lot more to keep a person interested in than Motostorm.

Secondly, we have to look at other facts. If people were so strongly against this kind of “blatant exploitation”, surely they would oppose it and refuse to buy. Need I really mention how many titles this game sold on pre-release alone? And before anyone starts accusing me of fanboyism here, let’s look at what kind of game-time I got out of this title compared to my last few reviews.

Let’s break down what we get here:

71 Playable Cars (Including tuned cars)

6 Tracks (These have many different layouts, not just reversible)

Online Play (16 Players)

Career Mode (Yes, it’s a decent length too)

Fine, so that’s already quite a bit, and just to put into perspective the way the tracks work, these layouts can change drastically, for example the Daytona track has a Speed ring and a Street track, which totally changes the experience.

Now just to compare game time here, and I’m talking single player, as the online can vary from game to game. In the last 2 weeks I have played quite a few decent games, and have completed most of them. Also, I am not a racing simulation fanatic or anything like that, yet I do enjoy car games, from all different style.

So let’s look at play time:

Devil May Cry 4 – +/- 12 Hours of gameplay (Single Player Complete), Army of Two – +/- 10 Hours of gameplay (Single Player Complete), Rainbow Six Vegas – +/- 10 Hours of gameplay (Single Player Complete), Super Mario Galaxy – +/- 30 Hours of gameplay (not even 30% complete).

So how does Prologue compare. Gran Turismo 5: Prologue – +/- 25 Hours of gameplay (about 60% Single Player complete, and about 6 cars purchased).

This leads to a very interesting debate, is R399.00 worth at least 25 hours of gameplay, I think so. Take a look at a few games in the last little while, which we pay top dollar for, and get maybe 6-10 hours of gameplay(excluding multiplayer), and with this game we get hours of pleasure and a small multiplayer component. I know it’s crap to have to pay for a so called “demo”, but I really don’t think this is a rip off at all, and I feel that I got value for money in bucket loads. Once again, this is IMHO, but would I buy it again, definitely, and will I buy the full game when it launches, hell yeah.

Last Updated: April 4, 2008