You have to admire Sony’s cheekiness with this one. The game we all want desperately to play is Gran Turismo 5 – as in, a proper sequel to Gran Turismo 4. But before we can have that, Sony wants us to be satisfied with a Prologue – a Prologue that contains only five tracks and doesn’t even have a split-screen two-player mode. It’s not necessarily a big swindle – but it certainly sounds like one. Let’s give Prologue the benefit of a fair trial, though, because I’ll be crucified by the bloodthirsty fanboys if I don’t…

Obvious things first: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is the best-looking ‘realistic’ console racer you can find. (Of course, it’s not fit to oil the cogs of the original Out Run, but that’s another matter.) Driving around the Fuji Speedway, with the whole thing running in 1080p at 60fps, is like seeing colour TV for the first time. The cars and track and background look stunning and move beautifully… most of the time. But sometimes Prologue tries to be a bit too clever and ends up looking daft, fatally running eight high-poly cars through a chicane at the same time and then incurring death by slowdown.

The new London circuit suffers most of all, especially when you reach A-class races – and there are some v-sync screen rips to go with the slowdown. But to be fair, these issues only crop up from time to time – nearly always Prologue looks phenomenally good.

It’s not just the in-game graphics which benefit from a proper HD seeing-to – Prologue’s front-end is like butter. There’s a roaming camera view of your current motor in the background, set in gorgeously rendered ‘world’ locations such as castle ruins, woods, and European plazas. There’s a little analogue clock to tell you the time. There’s a rolling info-bar announcing the latest weather from racetracks around the world. There’s even a motoring news stream to keep you in the loop.

The menu is set up like the PS3’s XMB – simple and classy. Before entering a race you can take a guide of the location with a hi-def video sequence showing footage from the track and its environment, along with some track history in text form. Prologue’s presentation is flawless.

So, it looks good. Fine. But is there enough content here to justify Sony’s decision to sell Prologue as a full-price PS3 game, as it’s doing in Japan? It’s a close call, but I think Sony can just about be excused.

There are two main modes of play: Arcade and Event, and there are none of the traditional Gran Turismo driving tests or licenses to work through. Diving straight into Arcade mode is a good way to get familiar with the tracks and cars.

There are five circuits: Suzuka, Fuji Speedway, Daytona Speedway, Eiger Nordwand (first seen in Gran Turismo HD Concept) and London – each of which can be played in some alternative form, either in reverse or via a different route. Arcade mode has Single Race and Time Trial options… yeah, all standard stuff, but you’d complain if it wasn’t there.