I saw a UFO once. Well, when I say ‘saw’ I actually mean I think I saw, and it was under pretty odd circumstances. Having completed our third Tesco run in the same night at about 4am, a chum and me were travelling back down the dual carriageway close to my house when we think we saw some odd ball of light travelling through the sky some distance away. Given the time of night and the amount of Red Bull we’d consumed, chances are that it was a lamppost.

The reason I am bothering to relate the above is that the cause of such late-night Tesco tomfoolery was an extended session on Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec. Such was our enthusiasm for the series at that stage of our lives that we began playing at about midday and didn’t stop until practically twenty-four hours later, by which stage we’d blazed a pretty impressive path through the game’s plethora of races. Trust me – you’ll never see two such accomplished Mazda 787B pilots as us. It was the kind of stuff that legends are made of.

It’s now some seven years later, on a ruddy cold Monday morning (not helped by sitting next to a door, but there we go). I’ve just spent a weekend with the latest entry in the series – Gran Turismo 5 Prologue – and am sitting here wondering whether to let Jekyll or Hyde rasp their thoughts all over the page.

Prologue’s release comes as something of a mixed bag, what with it basically being an extended demo of what we should be expecting from the full Gran Turismo 5 whenever that decides to get itself released. There’s a smidge over 70 cars, variants on six basic circuits and a whole load of challenges to work through, not forgetting the all-important online aspect that series fans have been gagging for since it went AWOL from the fourth game a few years back.

Of course, the first point that the naysayers will pick up on is that this is not a full product, and even the reduced price (about twenty notes if you shop about) is far too steep for what is in effect a beta test. To give Polyphony their dues there is actually a good fifteen hours of play on the offline section alone to be had here, with forty challenges of varying difficulty divided across four sections plus manufacturer-specific races and an arcade offshoot, so whilst it might sound a bit like Sony running off with your wallets you are actually getting a decent amount of play time for your coin.

What’s been packed in, then? A selection of manufacturers tilt their metallic caps our way, from the bog-standard fare such as Honda and Nissan through to Aston Martin and – hurray! – Ferrari. The range of cars is quite pleasing, too, and although it is likely you won’t want to waste much time trudging about in the horrifically slow Suzuki Cappuccino or Mini it does give you a proper sense of achievement when you then go on to strap yourself into a Nissan GTR, Ferrari F430 or, brilliantly, last year’s championship winning Ferrari F2007 Formula One car. There’re front-wheel-drives, rear-wheel-drives and all-wheel-drives available depending on your particular penchant, so it’s highly possible to find a car that suits you and use it to complete a vast amount of challenges.

You’re also offered a selection of circuits, from the excellent Suzuka to the not-so-great Fuji that’s taken its place in the F1 calendar. Series fans will no doubt be pleased to see the rather spiffing High Speed Ring take a bow as well in all its next-gen glory, and GT:HD track Eidur Nordwand, a London street circuit and Daytona make up the rest. There’s a couple of versions of each to get to grips with, so in effect you have 12 circuits to slalom around.

The driving model itself has been given a bit of an overhaul to make it more realistic, although should you struggle there’s the option to switch between two different handling settings as well as choosing how much traction control and stability assistance you require. This is all well and good, but one slight oversight is that there seems to be no option to turn ABS braking off, meaning that a potentially crucial feather in many a racer’s cap can’t be used.

The driving itself feels pleasantly solid this time, with the cars having a proper sense of inertia and body roll, allowing you to balance the car into and out of turns and use the throttle and brakes to steer the car into corners. Even when using the pad the control feels instinctive and allows for people with a bit of skill and practice to start shredding those extra few tenths off their lap times as they go, but at the same time the higher powered cars aren’t something you can take for granted and will bite if you mess up. Thus, going into a zone and reeling off perfect laps in your chosen motor becomes a very rewarding driving experience, and with a wheel with full force feedback support this feeling is only amplified.

However, quite a bit of this feeling is undone by the other aspects the game continues to carry, i.e. the lack of opposition AI and the absence of damage. Whatever people may say as to whether this changes the way the game is played, it really, really does. I hate to bring Forza Motorsport 2 into this, but it’s a truth that Turn 10’s 360 racer challenges you to not only peg it around circuits at full tilt but to also look after your car. The AI isn’t superb even then, but after a few races on GT5P it suddenly seems to be quite good by comparison. You’ll wince as you ping off other cars like a pinball and resume with barely any adverse effects, and you’ll want to smash your head against your TV as an opposing car tools around and turns in on you as if you weren’t even there.

Should you have the game yourself, here’s a little test for you. Take a relatively quick car out in the first Class D challenge at the Daytona oval. Zoom away from the pack, then brake to a standstill on the racing line in the middle of the back straight and count how many AI cars truck into you, even with a good ten seconds warning in clear vision. It’s depressing, isn’t it? Someone ought to tell Polyphony that, whilst we aren’t expecting all-out expert driving, a little crumb of intelligence would be great. At least you can’t say that the computer cars are soulless this time around, though; they are actually quite fallible and will make mistakes and fall off the circuit every now and again. It’s a start, sure, but there’s still a long way to go.

The whole upshot of the way you can drive GT5P also seems to have an adverse effect on online play, with a good three-quarters of the races I took part in blighted by rail-running and general argy-bargy. On top of this there’s a frequent lag issue that sees cars hopping around and popping in and out of existence quicker than a drop of the hat. In any case, I’m not so far up my own arse as to pretend that I have never tonked into someone accidentally or cut a corner, but with no incentives or penalties to act as a deterrent then it’s more-than-likely that a vast majority will just resort to this as their tactic of choice. For those not wanting to take the online plunge there’s a handy splitscreen mode should you have a like-minded buddy at hand.

Whilst I have my angry hat on, what’s the deal with the rolling starts? The theory behind these is that they are supposed to stop players pinballing around the massed pack at the first corner and coming out with an advantage, but all it does is unfairly penalise you and make challenges artificially difficult. Without the option to qualify you will find yourself in the middle of the pack or dead last in most challenges, and by the time the computer has dawdled you along the start/finish straight and handed you control you are often a good 15 seconds down on the leader with only a handful of laps to pull it back. Methinks this system may need a little rethink.

At least you can’t fault Prologue’s visual prowess. Each car has been sculpted with a freakish degree of detail (the Audi R8 is particularly fetching) and the circuits are all lavish and, in the appropriate cases, very good representations of the real thing. Twisting your way through the snake section at the start of the Suzuka lap whilst the sun and shadows move and shift across your steering wheel and driver’s hands from the excellent in-car view is really rather satisfying in a slightly geeky way.

When taken as a whole, Prologue is a bit of a mixed bag as you can see. It’s certainly got a few things right such as the ‘feel’ of driving the cars and the way it looks, but at the same point it still falls down in the same areas the series has always tripped itself up in. Hopefully Polyphony will take note of what we’re all saying (hello, if you’re reading!) and make the recommended changes in time for the proper game (sorry guys, that ‘manufacturers not allowing damage’ thing is wearing a little thin now), but as it stands the series doesn’t seem to be moving forward as much as it should be and things we were prepared to accept before have now been surpassed and bettered in other games. Perhaps the days of me troubling Tesco checkout staff at ridiculous hours in the morning are gone for good after all.