The holiday season is quickly approaching, and that means games are coming. Gamers everywhere are gleefully picking their sides, deciding which retailer offers the biggest score for their pre-order dollar. They scour the net looking for news, trailers and flame bait for the games they want. All the while they keep their hand over their eyes to steal little glances at the screen from between their fingers. Hoping to not see two words after the title of the game they want, “Delayed Until.” It has became fact, the last few holidays. Publishers get a little insecure about their title, and it gets pushed back to Q1 of the next year. They mostly attribute this to the behemoth that is Call of Duty, but this year there will be a new Halo as well, so I expect to start hearing a few more titles making the delay list soon. One often delayed title has a date and come hell or high water, Sony will make sure it hits it. November 2 2010 is the basket that Sony, has put has put all of its eggs in. Gran Turismo 5 will launch then, and I think Sony has a trick up their sleeve. Most of this year Sony has had a PS3 shortage or more like a controlled burn. They announced recently, that they are starting to make a profit on the PS3s. There has been rumors of two new PS3 models hitting the market, that offer bigger hard drives than current PS3s. Sony has stated that the GT series are system sellers, and they sell game copies. GT 5 Prologue was an over sized demo, that still managed to sell over 4 million copies at 40 bucks a whack. Enter the motion controls into the mix and things get interesting. Sony’s Move will be out 6 weeks before GT 5′s release date. By that time, games will be released and others will be patched, to be used with the Move. Last year, Sony had some amazing PS3 bundles. I was able to pick up 2 new slims and 6 games to add to my collection. I fully expect Sony to drop a mega bundle this holiday. One that includes the newest model of PS3, GT 5(LBP 2), and the Move. It is a no brainer. It would release 2 days before Microsofts Kinect, and the price might be an easier pill to swallow if it was grouped together. Plus, the PS EYE can be used with GT 5, for head tracking. I have a feeling Sony is walking up to the window as we speak, to place their bet.
Kazunori Yamauchi and his team at Polyphony Digital, are magicians. They constantly push the technical limits of what ever machine, they are building for. I remember when I played Destruction Derby on my PS1. I thought it looked great at the time, until the first Gran Turismo came out. Then DD’s graphics made me want to vomit. For the time, GT looked greater than anything I had I had seen, including arcades. I am not even a very big racing game fan, but I felt I was doing myself a disservice as a gamer, if I didn’t own it. As consoles upgraded, so did the GT series. The graphics and the sheer size of the games are amazing. Now we are in the current generation of gaming, and the wait for GT is agonizing. It has been to long since we had a full GT title, but the wait is almost over. We have heard for months that this game is about 90 % done, and was supposed to be out in Japan last April. I have a feeling, Sony is the responsible party for the last delay. They want to make sure that their flagship has all the new bells and whistles, that the PS3 will support. We have seen multiple videos and screenshots, and gear/petrol heads everywhere keep towels handy to wipe off after looking at the car porn. 2 1/2 months til release, are you excited? I am, already have the collector’s edition pre-ordered.
Kazunori Yamauchi, really loves cars, and it shows. The attention of detail he puts into his games, can only be described as a labor of love. He displays an OCD like perfectionist behavior, saying that there is always work that could be done to the game. As the info for GT 5 comes trickling out, you cannot help but notice the scale of the game. There are so many cars(almost 1000), tracks(70 from 20 locations), and racing styles, that this is not a racing game anymore, but a racing hub. With the addition of the WRC and NASCAR licenses, GT 5 should give you hundreds of hours of playtime. There is one thing that has me a little worried though. With the additions of firmwares and patches, games get rushed out and there is usually always a patch on day one. When games are patched for the right reasons that is understandable. Sometimes you have to do some network fixes, because you can’t always predict how servers will run if you get a couple million people playing a game. Other times it is to add features, like a new island to Burnout Paradise, or adding the RBN to Rock Band. Usually though, it is more of a way to fix the issues the developer/or publisher ignored before release. Looking at you MW 2 multi-player.
Will Kaz’s perfectionism allow GT 5 breathe and evolve, or will his OCD cause constant inner strife, that will make him turn it into a patched mess. I hope for the former. With so much development time being used for GT 5, I can safely say that this will be the only GT built for the PS3 specifically. With the amount of features it possesses, I am sure there will be post-release work to be done, but will it help to further the game or will it be tweaked numerous times until it is almost unplayable. I really hope that this game goes the LBP route, and uses it time to make upgrades and bring the game forward. Media Molecule has listened to their very avid community and their continued support has been awesome. Two years later and we still are receiving almost weekly DLC, and they added cool features via DLC, like water and the paint-a-nator. The cool thing was they patched the game, so there would not be a divide in the community. If you don’t purchase those items, you can still play other people levels that have them, you just can’t create. This is one spot where Rock Band has failed. I purchase a ton of DLC for RB, but if I go on line I have to keep playing the same on disk songs because no one has the DLC. That portion of the game is broken to me. It would be nice if they fixed this with RB 3. One game has gone the other way though. Uncharted 2 was an amazing game from an outstanding developer, Naughty Dog. They added multi-player to UC 2, and can’t seem to leave it alone. The constant tweaks to the game, made it so I never knew what balancing issues would arise, and I stopped playing on-line. My hope for GT 5 is, they learn new tricks along the way and bring them to us. Could you imagine having 32 players in one race, or a track editor like the one in ModNation Racers. How about if they added the Indy or F1 licence. These are the evolutions I can get behind. If we keep getting patches to fix things like tire pressure or if an announced feature is totally missing, then I will be disappointed. So, what do you think will be the case? Will GT 5 be evolutionary, or just patch happy?
