Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Goes Online

Polyphony Digital's Christmas gift to Gran Turismo 5 Prologue players (the game is out in Japan, in case you weren't aware) arrived around noon on Christmas Day in the form of an update enabling online play.

The first thing you'll notice after agreeing to one of those online end user agreement things that nobody actually reads are changes to the GT5 Prologue menus. The game now includes options for "Online" and "Ranking."

"Ranking," is just what the name suggests: an online ranking viewer. You can filter rankings by track, car type, tire type, and even physics mode (standard or professional). The game lets you view and save replays for the top racers on each track.
The real meat of the update is in the Online mode. Select this option and you're taken to a race selection screen. On this first day of online play, the game has just four live race events against other racers and four time trials where you attempt to beat other players' best times.

Once all opponents are found, the game jumps into the race. Well, almost. While load times aren't a problem in offline play, they sure are in online play. We discovered waits of over two minutes to start up a race. Hopefully this is something that will be fixed with future optimizations.
Aside from the long load times, we found our first few online races to be smooth, with no lag issues. Best of all, the game is super quick about getting you back into the online menu screen after a race so that you can select another event.

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