Gran Turismo 5: My Battle with Menus.

GT5 and I are having a love/hate relationship. No, it's not like what Super Meat Boy and I have. Meat Boy might hate me but at least he allows me, even wants me, to play his game. GT5 is a fun simulator but I'm really pretty reluctant to call it a game. I don't know why but it just doesn't sit right with me that way. As a simulator it works great. The cars are a blast to drive and I've been playing a lot of it just so I can level up, get more cars to tune and drive, and see more tracks. So what's my problem? I'm not sure GT5 really wants me to play it. It hides all of it's best parts behind a huge wall of horribly designed menus.

Allow me to count the menus in this game and the number of times you have to press the X button before you actually get to race.  Upon booting the game up from the XMB you're prompted to press X on a button that says "okay". This is to confirm everything is loaded. Then you press X or start to skip the 40 minute (that's an exaggeration) long FMV sequence of a car being built that's quickly followed by a second intro video of cars racing set to My Chemical Romance's Planetary (Go!). Now you're at the main menu. There are 7 more menu options here but I'm not going to get into all of them because I want to talk about GT mode and its menus. So, after you click on GT mode it takes you to your home page. Here you have all your options for A-spec and B-spec racing as well as going to dealerships (both new and used). You can also tune your car, take pictures, edit tracks, manage the cars in your garage, etc. There is a lot here. Note that none of this is arranged in a convenient way. It's all blocked up in the screen very awkwardly like some kind of bizarre car Tetris stuck in limbo. Anyway, since this is a racing sim, you select A-spec and it takes you to yet another menu. This one is (amazingly) in list form and shows the different racing series from beginner to extreme. Upon making your selection you're taken to yet another menu. This one is a grid display of the available events. You pick an event and it takes you to yet another menu screen where you can choose one of the races in the event or (if it's a championship) you can choose to run the whole set of races. You'd better hope you have the right car though because if you don't you'll have to open your garage menu to change your car and that takes more time than you'd think. What if you don't have the right car in your garage? Well you're in luck. You get to press the O button like thirty times until you're all the way back at your home screen. Then you get to navigate the dealership menus. After you've bought the right car from the dealerships you get to navigate all the way back to the race through the four or five (or six) menus in between. Amazing.

My DB9 Coupe. 

Seriously. It's amazing. Not amazing in a good way but amazing that in the six years this game was in development no one stopped, looked at the menus, compared them to other racing games, and said,"hey, maybe this is a bad idea." In the time it took for Gran Turismo 5 to reach a point where it could be released there have been 3 Forza games. I can't speak for Forza 1 or 3 but when I played 2 the menus worked in favor of the player. They wanted you to spend more time racing than moving through menus. Shouldn't that be what a racing sim is about? Racing? If I wanted to play a menu simulation I'd open Photoshop.

Don't get me started on the myriad things that go unexplained about the menus either. The other day when I logged in to do some races in my Aston Martin DB9 Coupe '06, I couldn't. Every time I went to select the vehicle it was unavailable. It turns out it was set to "online", as indicated by a small blue dot in the top left corner of the cars tab on my garage screen. In order to use it I'd have to select the car and remove it from online status. This took me all of ten minutes to figure out because no where is it explained how any of these menus work. It ends up being a trial in patience for the player. It shouldn't take this long to be able to race in a racing simulation. The manual contained in the game box is sparse in it's information as well. I'd attribute this to the digital manual contain within the game but I shouldn't have to go through and read all of that to understand these archaic menus. Games have gotten past this point.

As much as I've ragged on Gran Tursimo 5 for its menus I can't say that it's bad. I wouldn't keep playing it if it was. Racing, collecting cars, and even just shaving seconds off a previous lap time are all rewarding in their own right. I haven't tried the online yet because I've heard the lobbies for it are garbage but I plan on doing that soon. The cars look and sound great and the actual driving is really fun. The music during races is often muffled by the sounds of the cars and the music in the menus (smooth jazz) is often hit or miss for me depending on if I'm in the cheesy lounge mood or not.

But hey, any game where I can drive an Aston Martin is okay by me.