The 17 year-old even plays it wearing a helmet and gloves.

Shoes, pants! He’s not wearing shoes and pants!

『グランツーリスモ５P』でF1ドライバーを目指すイケメン17歳　大谷涼くん [オレ的ゲーム速報＠刃]

Army of Two, Battlefield: Bad Company, Devil May Cry 4, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction all get the price drop and new packaging effective June 16.

“Games deemed ‘Greatest Hits’ have reached a significant sales threshold. This latest selection features several critically acclaimed titles, including Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Metal Gear Solid 4, which represent the high calibre of quality software that is available on the PS3 system,” said Scott A. Steinberg, vice president, product marketing, SCEA. “We’re looking forward to making this group of best sellers even more accessible to consumers, while we continue to deliver more value to the overall PS3 platform.”

There was booze, picture-taking and C-level celebrities in attendance, but the two tech demos shown at Downshift Session 2008 were much more interesting. The team at Polyphony Digital had a special installation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, one that required four PlayStation 3s to run.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, which normally runs at 1920 x 1080 resolution, got a boost from four times the processing power of the PS3, enabling it to run at 3840 x 2160. Each PS3 handled the rendering of a quarter of the total display area. This image was projected on a 220-inch screen via Sony’s SRX-S110 projector, which is capable of handling a 4096 x 2160 image… and is too expensive to quote.

The Polyphony dudes also put together a separate demo that ran GT5P at 240 frames per second, four times that of the standard 60. According to the hyperbole laden official report, every man, woman and child in attendance had their brains melted by the refresh rate.

From Gran-Turismo.com: “It is as though you are following a real world event happening right in front of your face with your own eyes. Any and all flickering in the movement of the vehicle, in the smoke from the tires, etc. are completely gone, and you are almost tricked into believing you are watching something in real life.”

More details on the event can be seen at the official Gran Turismo site.

Downshift Session 2008 [Gran-Turismo.com via NeoGAF]

But until Gran Turismo 5 actually comes out, we can only get a taste of things to come through Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. So is that taste making reviewers hungry for more? Hit the jump for our Frankenreview to find out—a buncha reviews with the crust cut off because we know you like it that way.

Dark Zero
Gran Turismo 5…ups that realism to an insanely high level. Not only in its boasting of tossing around 200,000 polygons, but also in the way physics differ for each car, at times offering infinitesimal but still noticeable changes in the way you must drive each car. Making sure each is different it from the one before.

Jolt
Online play is certainly welcome, but compared to rival games, the lobby features are not what we’ve come to expect from this generation. We’ve no doubt that’s one of many things that will change come GT5’s release, but that’s not what we’re reviewing here today.

Videogamer
What doesn’t impress nearly as much is the way your AI rivals behave during races. The GT series has always been criticised for its racing experience and GT5 Prologue doesn’t improve things a great deal…At times while playing Forza 2 you could have mistaken an AI driver for a real-life opponent, but no such mistake could be made while playing Prologue.

IGN
…in order to complete every race in the game you’ll have to do some serious grinding for cash in order to simply be able to afford the cars you need. The bare-minimum ride selection will cost you somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.5 million credits, while the biggest payoff you’ll get for any race is around 30k credits. Considering that most of the races pay far less than this, you’re looking at a whole lot of repeat laps…

Kotaku
Look, as a demo, it’s a good one. What’s already on offer looks great, and feels great, so GT fans should have little doubt that when the full game’s released – with hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks – Gran Turismo 5 will be everything they want it to be. But now, as a retail product? With a limited singleplayer experience and unstable online play, I just don’t think it’s worth $40.

But if you’re still on the fence over whether it’s worth shelling out 60% of the full game’s asking price for what’s probably less than 10% of its content, read on, dear readers, read on.

Loved

• Graphics – Still a little sterile as far as the tracks are concerned (London excepted), but gorgeous nonetheless. Between the cars, in-car view and HDR lighting tricks this is the game you’ll want to use if you’re the type who has friends over just to show off how important your PS3 is to you and your home entertainment setup.
• Difficulty Curve – GT5P’s got a new, improved assist mode for beginners, and it’s the best I’ve seen in a racing game. Not only do you get an indicator for where the racing line is and when you need to brake, it actually tells you how fast you need to be going when you hit the braking-point. Very handy.
• Car Handling – No surprises here, it’s the series’ strength. Cars feel reasonably real, there’s a marked difference between cars, blah blah blah. It’s GT, you know the score, and even feels a little more forgiving than GT4, especially in some of the shittier cars. Oh, unless you turn off the assists. Then it’s brutal as hell.

Hated

• Collision Modelling – The prettier and more realistic this game gets, the more its poor collision modelling stands out. I don’t need to see scratches and broken glass on my car. What I do need – and what I expect of a series that’s striving so hard for realism – is that when I hit a wall or another car, I feel like I’ve hit a wall or car. Not a stack of fluffy pillows stuffed with marshmallows.
• Six Tracks? – There’s only six tracks, and even then, you spend most of the singleplayer events on only three of them (you race on the beautiful London track once). Those are slim pickings.
• The GRIND – The game’s short on singleplayer content (I finished every event in just over a day), so it resorts to grinding to pad things out. Example: many races force you to buy a specific vehicle. So you have to repeatedly complete earlier races to get the cash for it, then usually only use the thing once. Next time you run into a car-specific race, you’ll need to grind out the cash all over again. In a full GT game, this is fine, as there’s a wealth of races to enter to spread things out and give you a little variety. With only a handful of tracks here, though, the grind is noticeable, and it’s boring as hell.
• Online Play – I entered 30 online races, and not a single one was without serious issues. Cars blinked in and out of existence, and poor net code resulted in opponents that zoomed off into the distance at lightspeed, only to then reappear right in front of you. Makes racing, especially on packed circuits, really, really hard.

Look, as a demo, it’s a good one. What’s already on offer looks great, and feels great, so GT fans should have little doubt that when the full game’s released – with hundreds of cars and dozens of tracks – Gran Turismo 5 will be everything they want it to be. But now, as a retail product? With a limited singleplayer experience and unstable online play, I just don’t think it’s worth $40. Not until they add more content or fix the online multiplayer, anyways.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue was developed by Polyphony Digital, published by Sony Computer Entertainment and is due to be released in the US on April 17. Retails for $US 39.99. Available on PlayStation 3. Played singleplayer events to completion, completed 30 online races.

According to an interview with IGN, it may still be en route, via a software update. And it may be coming as soon as this spring. We will, of course, believe it when we see it.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue gets Smashed [IGN]

“We would like to apologise for the lack of a PS Store refresh yesterday,” Sony said. “As previously mentioned, we unfortunately experienced some last minute technical difficulties and were unable to publish the new content as planned.”

GT5P is joined by the UEFA Euro 2008 demo, Unreal Tournament 3 and Turok map packs, and the Eye of Judgment Bio Rebellion card set. We now return you to your previously scheduled download.

PS3 Store updated, Sony apologises [Eurogamer]

Unfortunately due to some last minute technical difficulties, we were unable to publish the new content to the PS Store yesterday. We are working to resolve these issues and will let you know as soon as new content is posted.

Guess that’ll hafta do. Though something like “We fucked up” would’ve been a little more colorful.
Technical Difficulties [VideoGamer]

We’ve had a lot of discussions with the manufacturers and although at the beginning they hated the idea of deformation, now they’re slowly coming around to it. We’ve still got a few to convince, but we will. Expect deformation in the very near future: very, very soon.

Rubbish. If I can demolish an exquisitely-modelled Ferrari in Project Gotham Racing, I can do it in Gran Turismo. Quit being such a ninny over scratching your lovely, shiny car models and bring a dash of realism to the series, will you? This excuse is as wafer-thin as the arse-end of my favourite jeans.
Yamauchi: Expect GT deformation “very, very soon” [VG247]