A trio of games that peaked with last year’s Forza III, a supremely confident title that embodied the online community more than anything else before, turning gamers into artists, tuners and market-sellers through the notion that user designed content reigns supreme. The elephant in the room now, of course, is Turn 10’s Forza lineage. Few could argue that Polyphony haven’t succeeded in the past, though – the Gran Turismo series is widely regarded as the best racing simulator on consoles. Indeed, apart from last year’s slight misfire on the PSP everything since the 2005 release of PlayStation 2 GT4 has been high definition whispers, cautionary notes of what might be if we all wanted hard enough. The desire to achieve the zenith of the genre is the driving force behind Polyphony Digital’s recent output, not that the studio has been particularly numerous in their offerings.

That’s why, if you’ve not already skipped to the end, there’s no score here – assigning such an abitrary figure to just a subset of the game would be disingenuous. That’s – if you count Saturday and Sunday – four days to not only write and prep the review for launch but also play through the entire GT Mode, sample Arcade and play and test the online functionality – this, you’ll no doubt appreciate, is impossible. You see, there’s a problem here: the game’s out now but TheSixthAxis, along with (it’s safe to assume) every UK outlet with an advance copy, only received final code at the weekend. Gran Turismo 5: finished, complete, perfect. A monumental achievement, a tale of automobile nirvana, the ultimate car racing game. There’s a certain poignant resonance about that sentence – a game that’s continuously teased a rabid fan-base with a slow, methodical drip feed of screenshots and info, a game that has already poked two stunted, stripped down versions out in the form of free-to-download GTHD and demo-esque Prologue, is finally here. The second this post goes live, stores around the world will be opening up and finally, after 5 years, you’ll be able to get your hands on Gran Turismo 5.