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  GT5 is s the gaming equivalent to a racing school ? fooling around won't do you any favours. Photo Gallery

• VIDEO: GT5 launch in Spain

The latest instalment of the Gran Turismo car racing simulator blurs the divide between reality and the virtual world ...

... more than any console-based game before it. The realism when you slide behind the wheel of one of the 200 "Premium" models in the game is that good, whether you're rating the cars on their looks or how they handle around some of the world's top racetracks.

For driving purists, that's close to nirvana. For general gamers, it will restrict the long-term appeal of GT5, simply because it demands total commitment to master. It's the gaming equivalent to a racing school — fooling around won't do you any favours.

That's not to say it isn't fun — it is hugely, time-distortingly entertaining — you don’t sell 56 million games if there isn’t a market for them.

Casual gamers are welcome to pick up a controller and go for a spin, but that's just what they'll be doing. It's like the 70-year-olds who can finally afford a Ferrari — they’ll enjoy it, but are never going to unleash the car's potential. It’s some of the many niches, like the “drift trial” section, that will be of greatest interest to the casual players.

Creating this game has been a five-year labour of love for Polyphony Digital creator Kazunori Yamauchi.

That’s longer than many of the cars in the game actually took to go from design sketches to production and has been a source of frustration for GT5 fans worldwide.

In Yamauchi’s defence, his perfectionist approach extends to all the many facets of the game and the resulting DVD is far more than just a console-clone of the cars. Owners can customise their vehicles, photograph them in picturesque locations around the globe, use the course editor to become their own track designer and — finally — go online and race up to 15 other like-minded car nuts.

Straight-up racing is still the main course, but the side dishes are just as tasty and less time-consuming. The Special Events puts you behind the wheel of everything from karts to Nascars and World Rally Championship cars, complete with a coaching voice-over by reigning WRC champion Sebastien Loeb.

The soul of the Gran Turismo series has always been its driving dynamics and Yamauchi has leveraged the power of Sony's PlayStation 3 to create vehicles that judder, twitch and shake as they're tormented by aggressive drivers and challenging road cambers.

There's no sense of the arcade-style feel that some of its rivals rely on — you don't recover from mashing the accelerator mid-corner in a Lamborghini Murcielago, for instance — and that teaches better car control.

Whether that translates into better driving behaviour off the console and into the real world will be a PhD project for an enterprising uni grad, but it certainly makes Gran Turismo 5 the most realistic racer on the market.

There are 1031 cars in the game, with the vast majority — more than 800 — drafted in from previous versions of the game, which explains how Australia's VZ Commodore SS and Monara earn a start.

These "Regular" vehicles don't have the polygon-perfect look of the Premium models — and none of the cars deform as they should in a crash. They now take damage — previous versions of the series didn’t have any damage modelling — but it's almost as though the Polyphony designers couldn't bring themselves to trash their vehicles.