Well friends, here we are. Gran Turismo 5 has finally launched. The series has provided a marquee title for each successive generation of Sony consoles—the original Gran Turismo sold many gamers on the PlayStation, GT3 was hotly anticipated for the PS2, and many racing fans have held off on buying a PS3... until now.

Car nerds, petrolheads, automotive otaku—all worship the franchise. Gran Turismo brought an immersive romp through some of the world's great cars right into your living room. This newest entry into the series has never faced higher expectations, and the game that has finally arrived shows flashes of brilliance, but just as many signs of fatigue. Is it possible that a game this many years in the making can feel rushed?

It took a long time to get here

Gran Turismo 5 ps3* Release Date: now

now MSRP: $59.99 to $99.99 Official site * = platform reviewed

Polyphony Digital has always made a big deal about accurately modeling each car, from its dimensions and weight distribution to the right shades of paint and tone of exhaust. The cars handle the way you'd expect them to, you can soup them up and thrash them around some of the greatest race tracks real or imagined, and, thanks to graphics that have always been best-in-class, entertain yourself by watching stunning replays. It says something that the GT franchise still has the greatest mindshare when it comes to driving games, despite six years (Six years! SIX!!) since the last proper installment.

Let's get to that elephant in the room now. This game eventually began to rival Duke Nukem Forever in the vaporware hall of fame. The company already had a track record for this sort of behavior. Ask me sometime to bore you about how long I waited for GT PSP, the mobile installment of the series. In the gap between 4 and 5, Microsoft has given us three installments of Forza Motorsport, raising the bar each time. For the first time, Gran Turismo has real competition out there, and given that it’s taken six years to see the light of day, it’s not entirely unreasonable to expect very great things indeed.

And yet the continuing delays set tongues wagging. Successive trade shows and expos brought news of new features being added, like NASCAR racing, go-karts, Gran Turismo TV, and 3D—but also the disappointing news that cars would be rendered in varying levels of quality, not to mention a distinct lack of concrete release date information. When Ars Gaming Editor Ben Kuchera came back from E3 during the summer, his report left me with thoughts of deckchairs and the Titanic.

Over the course of these six years, the original species of console racing fan (Homo racingfanboicus), like Darwin’s finches of the Galapagos or the cichlids of Lake Tangynika, have evolved into new species, in this case H. racingfanboicus granturismus and H. racingfanboicus forzamotorsporticus.

The former existed on a slow diet of warm leftovers, titles like GT:HD, Tourist Trophy, and GT:Prologue. Their cousins in the Microsoft ecosystem instead developed on a different diet, one with fewer cars that didn’t look as pretty, but with online gameplay, damage, and manufacturer’s licenses like Porsche that Sony either couldn't or wouldn't bring us (and no, Ruf doesn't count).

All that is over, so let's race... or, maybe, let's update

So, to recap: long wait, new generation of PlayStation hardware, stiff competition in the form of Microsoft's Forza series, and great expectations. When November 24th, 2010 rolled around, the game was actually in stores and on sale, although the Best Buy I visited didn't seem to have any promotional displays, nor was the game prominent on the shelves or end caps. I'd planned ahead and bought a PS3 a couple of weeks earlier, amusing myself with GT:Prologue and hoping against hope that GT5 would feature a better physics model.

Upon returning home, I put the disc into the PS3, and, perhaps betraying my naivety about PS3-related matters, expected to get racing. Instead, I first had to download and install a software update, the first of two in the space of four days.

A firmware update to my Fanatec racing wheel was also needed, and at that point I was starting to question the sanity of everyone involved in the game's development. A rush of people online made even the single-player suffer, which was maddening.

They say it's always darkest before dawn, and I was pretty dark by then. Residual goodwill stemming from the many hours I'd put in with GTs 1-4 was just about gone, but after playing for many extended sessions, here's the take-home message: at its core, GT5 is a damn good racing game.