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Gran Turismo purists should know better than to get your hopes up about GT5's release date, but then, you're a Gran Turismo purist. You can't control yourself.
It's the stuff of vapourware legend. Back when Sony was first unveiling the PSP, Sony shows off Gran Turismo PSP, tells us all that's what we've got to look forward to. Turns out it was all lies. Four years on and there's still no sign of a Gran Turismo PSP. No screenshots, no trailer, no demo, no release date, no exclusive, paid-for preview with a major magazine, nothing. It is, for all intents and purposes, a ghost project. Regardless, Polyphony Digital would like us all to believe otherwise, and are still trying to convince us the game's actually coming. Speaking with IGN, Polyphony boss Kazunori Yamauchi has said, with regards to GT PSP, "it is moving forward. It hasn't been knocked off the plans: it's there". Four years on and all we've got is "it's there"? Pardon me if my finely-honed sense of scepticism is tingling.
Gran Turismo Interview [IGN, via VG247]
Half-Life isn't the only game celebrating its tenth birthday this year. Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo series is now a decade old, leading the developer of the PlayStation driving sim to hold an anniversary event called Downshift Session 2008 in New York City last month. Yes, yes, mazal tov, Kazunori Yamauchi and crew.
North America, Japan, this doesn't apply to you. But Europe? Pay attention. Sony have provided the first real details on their Gran Turismo/Nissan academy program. Which, to recap, is a GT5: Prologue competition, where the fastest online racers are not only given the chance to race a real 350Z around the Eiger Nordwand, but the fastest drivers from that are given a shot at racing in a 24-hour race in Dubai next year. For real. The competition will kick off on June 2, and will run for seven weeks. So long as you register your PSN ID and can log a time during those seven weeks, you'll be in with a shot.
Sony just rattled our mailbox to let us know that, presumably just as a single copy of GT5 Prologue was slid into a plastic bag and handed to a customer somewhere in Japan, that the combined sales from the Gran Turismo series have now reached 50 million units in the ten years since the series debuted on PS1. Attached to the press release is a handy guide to just how many copies of each game have been sold, but if you simply must know now, the highest-selling title (by a fairly comfortable margin, too) is GT3, with the god-awful GT4: Prologue registering as the poorest-performing of the lot.
There are people, reading this right now, who bought a $US 600 PlayStation 3 at launch for one game: Gran Turismo 5. Why? Because despite the recent advancement of other racing franchises, Polyphony Digital's near religious devotion to automobiles has offered hardcore racing/racing game fans an unparalleled driving simulation for a decade.
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.
Maybe. Maybe. Speaking with German site derStandard, Gran Turismo series creator Kazunori Yamauchi has hinted that in order to take some money from the Chinese market, Sony may look at...unique ways of releasing GT:
Es ist sehr sehr unwahrscheinlich, dass GT auf einer anderen Konsole herauskommt. Aber vielleicht kommt es auf den PC. Vor allem am chinesischen Markt könnten wir so die Verbreitung fördern. [It's very, very unlikely that GT will be appearing on another console. But maybe it'll be released on PC. Particularly for the Chinese market.]PC, huh? Good for them. Maybe on PC the online would actually work!
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is a demo. A big one, yes, but a demo it remains, one that gives us but a taste of what we can expect from the full, final Gran Turismo 5 when it ships on the PS3 sometime next year. Serious fans of the series will no doubt already know what they're getting themselves into with this whole "Prologue" business, then, and won't give a monkey's brass balls what I say from here on in.
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.
Gran Turismo creator Kazanori Yamauchi? Total liar. Or at least a total fibber. Speaking about Gran Turismo's continued lack of damage-modelling, he says:
Like I said, Europe loves Gran Turismo. In return, Gran Turismo loves Europe. So much so that series creators Polyphony Digital have broken with tradition and included an F1 car in Gran Turismo 5. For the bargain-basement price of 2 million in-game credits, you'll be able to pick up the Ferrari F2007 and take it for a spin. Poignantly, this is being called "God Mode".
