Meh, good to know that the AI in Gran Turismo 5 is still as fucking terrible as it always was. I love having to restart races because I get pushed off of the course.
What's worse is that GT5 introduces some events (I think GT4 had them as well, just not as many of them) where you can get disqualified for coming into contact with the AI drivers. I say "coming into contact with" because they can slam into you and you'll be the one that gets fucked. It's infuriating.
The worst part is that the only way to get enough money to buy some of the cars that you need to get through the beginning races is to do some of those awful special events. Ugh. Just let me fucking race and quit with the esoteric bullshit, already!
Let's not even get into the abortion that is the painting system. You have to literally buy cars of a particular color, get a "paint item" from them, and use those "paint items" to color your other cars. What the shit? That would be like if buying a red card earned you a license to buy red paint. If you wanted to paint another car red, you'd have to trade in the license for the paint. It doesn't make any sense and is stupid as hell.
I think I'm just going to stick with a wait and see attitude on GT from now on. As far as I'm concerned Forza Motorsport is still a must-buy game, though. With each release of Forza it's taken strides to cut the bullshit and just let the player race, rewarding players for willingly increasing the difficulty. I can deal with the license exams in Gran Turismo (I don't think they should be required, but I like that they're there), but most of the other random bullshit -- like a horrendously slow and painful race with 12 Volkswagen Buses (I'm not shitting you) -- just needs to die.
Oh, almost forgot. GT5 ripped off the driver leveling system of Forza and made it shitty. Instead of unlocking races, it unlocks the privilege of buying certain cars. It's like the arbitrary car unlock system in Forza 1 and 2, only worse because it will quite literally throw cars in your face that you cannot get. I don't remember which car I was vying for, but on my first trip into the used car dealership at the start of the game I saw a car that I really wanted to start out with. I was even able to afford it. Oops, too bad, I needed to be driver level 2 and I was driver level 0. What's worse is that I had to buy a car to even get into the license exams, so I couldn't just go in, take a few exams, hit level 2, and hope that the car was still listed. Nope, I got fucked out of it.
Don't even get me started on the load times. For a game that installs 6.5GB to the hard drive, the load times are as slow as Forza 3, which loads off of the disc for the most part. Ugh.
I really want to like it but it clearly hates me.
