Gran Turismo 5 Preview

Kazunori Yamauchi is excited. He's showing us three cars from the 1967 Le Mans 24-hour race - the Ferrari 330 P4, the Ford Mark IV and the Jaguar XJ13 - and they all look beautiful. The P4 is one of Yamauchi's favourite cars of all time.

That's not why he's excited though. He's excited because only two of the cars - the P4 and the Mark IV - actually made it to Le Mans. The XJ13 was cancelled just prior to the race. Yamauchi is excited because now he can finally drive the 1967 Le Mans the way it was meant to be.

Yes, we're at another trade show being taught about cars by Kazunori Yamauchi. He introduces us to the Pagani Zonda R'09 - all Batmobile curves and yellow rims - and reminds us it beat the course record for commercial cars at Nurburgring recently. Then there's the Subaru Impreza Sedan WRX STI '10, and the Lexus IS F Racing Concept '08 - "originally intended for the DTM".

Then we see another veteran of 1967, the Lamborghini Miura P400 Bertone Prototype. "Only two were made, but one was destroyed in an accident. The other car was maintained in pristine condition by JW Marriott in the US, so we went and did a session with his car and perfectly recreated it within the game."

We also see the Monza track briefly - a new course for gamescom - and Yamauchi reassures everyone that the game is nearly finished. "Even as we speak 140 staff back at polyphony are working night and day to finish everything," he says through a translator.

But none of this is why we're here today. We're here to meet "The Red and Blue of GT". The red in this case is A-Spec mode, The Real Driving Simulator, the bit we're all familiar with. The blue is B-Spec - The Racing Simulation RPG.

"In 2001 when I released Gran Turismo 3 it had a name, A-Spec, and that was because I had intended to release a Gran Turismo B-Spec immediately afterwards," he says. "Unfortunately that didn't go too well and though we included this in Gran Turismo 4 experimentally, now we've been able to create what I originally intended. Now this will be included in the game at the same level as A-Spec."

While A-Spec concerns itself with straight-up racing, B-Spec is about managing a team of drivers. Races play out in a "command view" where you can watch one of up to six drivers on your books through a main viewer, keep an eye on tyre wear and relative positions, and issue instructions.

There are several other ways to keep track of your driver's progress. You can go to a full racing view and switch between standard in-game camera angles, and you can switch to a live timing view showing sector times, best and last laps, and the gap between cars.

Every screen shows you your driver's mental and physical endurance levels and whether he's calm or agitated by what's going on. You then issue instructions - to slow down, maintain pace, speed up, attempt to overtake, pit or not pit. Drivers should listen to you, but you need to manage them carefully, because an agitated driver may ignore you.

Yamauchi does a quick demo but there's hardly time to take it in because then he's on to the Course Maker. "This isn't something you would use to make an exact recreation of a road," says Yamauchi, scotching visions of a proper 3D track creator. "But you can make tracks that suit parameters you specify."

He switches to the game and starts by picking a theme - sunset in Toscana, although there appear to be lots of others - before playing with some slider bars and dropdowns to change the number of sectors, course type (one-way or loop), weather and time of day. Tracks can be up to 10km long.

He then jumps into the game via the Test Drive button and within seconds he's zooming down highways through parched fields and villages. He exits back to the Course Maker screen and tunes a couple of sectors, changing the frequency of curves, course width, sharpness of corners, degree of topography tracing and bank angles. When he hits Test Drive again he's facing a totally different course of rising straights and increasingly sharp, technical corners.

"It's not practical to have a regular course creator," says Yamauchi, "because it ends up being a complicated 3D tool and nobody would be able to use it." Course Maker certainly looks easy to use.

At E3 Yamauchi showed off a couple of the game's photo modes, but he was saving one up for gamescom - the 3D version. "At this point in time I think this is one of the best ways to use the 3D format," he says, inviting us forward to look at a few shots, which are stored in a format that you can output to your PC and share with people. "You can actually get a better experience of 3D if you're looking at a still image."

Finally, Yamauchi shows us kart racing. "This is something we were actually saving for Gran Turismo 6, but the information leaked out so we decided we would just put it in this one," he says. Never mind - by the time GT6 comes out we'll be worrying about flying cars and voting for Obama's kids.

It's been a whirlwind of features and car chatter, beneath which the game still looks fantastic. It may have been in development for the whole of this console generation, but the technical arms race has slowed down and GT5 still looks as good as any other racing game we've seen, and it is, to say the least, comprehensive.

It's also definitely, totally and utterly coming out on 3rd November, says Yamauchi. We ask him if he'd take another year if Sony offered it to him, and he laughs. He says no.