My brother and I have played the Gran Turismo series since number three. I enjoy them in spurts and my brother has played them obsessively in past. We were both fairly anxious for a full HD upgrade to GT4 and the list of new features and cars made GT5 out to be exactly what we both wanted: more straight-up car racing in real model cars. Not an overly ambitious goal, but sometimes I need to unwind with a down-to-earth title and Gran Turismo fits the bill admirably. 

We have been playing GT5 for about 4 hours now and while the core concepts of the game are still intact, it has totally failed to impress me.

The graphics are not good. Yamauchi has an eye for detail and his passion for the cars is made obvious when you try to discriminate any of the cars from the real thing--you have to try, and that is testament enough to their craftsmanship. But the cars only make up a fraction of your viewing area while racing and it is equally obvious that a comparatively meager amount of time went into the environment. Trees are classic doubled sprites, the grass has no tone to it, the audience is as unconvincing as it ever was...but the worst offenders are the distant backdrops which look universally terrible. No effort was put into them at all; you get the impression that each track is suspended in mid-air, a thousand of feet off the ground.
 
The menus are garbage. Nearly every race has stringent requirements for entry, requiring you to scour the globe for cars on a regular basis. This doesn't really bother me; in a game with over a thousand cars I want to be swapping them out on a semi-regular basis so I can at least see a sizable portion of what's on offer. But the dealerships are arranged alphabetically, the cars in each are arranged by price, and there is no other way to sort or search them. This is a nightmare when looking for a European FR mobile made between 1960 and 1979 (a dreampipe attempt to use the same car in three different cups). Is this any worse than it used to be? No. Is this acceptable after five years of development on an unmodified premise? No. The sting here is that the garage has a ton of filters that make finding the car you want a breeze. Polyphony simply didn't put this functionality in the other browsers.
 
Loading times. Holy shit. We installed the game; it took over 40 minutes for the PS3 to soak up 8 gigs from the GT5 Blu-Ray, and if this is the result I shudder to think what the game must be like without the install. Browsing for cars is a mostly text-based affair, as it can take upwards of 5 seconds to bring a car on-screen after highlighting it in the dealer menus. The races also take a ridiculous amount of time--an amount made even more frustrating by the quality of the environment the game renders once its done. Load times are even frustrating between menus. 
 
This does not sum my complaints totally, but it is more than enough text-based rage for one blog post. I certainly hope that Polyphony puts some major patchwork into this game, because most of my problems with it are completely fixable post-launch. 
 
I'm sure plenty of other people have been harping these things over the last two days. I just need some catharsis from the BLAEGHURGH is all.