Gran Turismo 5 Prologue: Photo-Real at Last?
If Gran Turismo 5 stinks, who cares how amazing it looks, but let's assume based on this particular series' track record that it won't and shamelessly revel in the latest screenshots. Check these out.
Even I'm not completely immune to the power of photo-real visuals you can fiddle with in realtime. So long as (a) the end product matches the marketing hype, and (b) the game as a rule always plays better than it looks.
As for 'a', the history of the Gran Turismo series speaks for itself. It's one of those games you walk into a store running a PS2 demo and wonder whether someone's got a PC and a couple high-end video cards running in tandem tucked away inside the display kiosk. Chalk that up to everything a racer doesn't have to render, allowing the dev team to focus almost exclusively on visuals and physics Oh, and getting more cars simultaneously on the track -- GT5 lets you race up to 16 cars at once and online to boot.
As for the second point, I'm sure there's a mathematical formula for this somewhere (I'm leaning toward 2:1, personally). All I know is, it's absolutely true, and that I only wish more gamers felt the same way I do. Too often with some of today's best selling games (I'm sorry, did someone say Mass Effect?) that ratio's reversed.
Of course you'll want a high definition TV that does honest-to-goodness 1080p to really appreciate the "over 40 stunning, high-performance cars" in GT5, but if you have the high-def muscle, Sony claims the racer runs all that at a stunning 60 frames per second.
You'll also be able to download the game, which ships on a Blu-ray disc, but only weighs in at a modest 1.9 GB online. You get down to that number by apparently using a godlike compression algorithm as well as by stripping out all the cinematic videos and whatever other miscellany's considered inessential to the bottom line.
Gran Turismo 5, exclusive to the PlayStation 3, ships on April 17.
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GT5 Prologue looks so good I still cant believe its real
"If GT5 Prologue Stinks.." ??? Um... I don't know what GT games you've played in the past, but they are THE best sim racing games ever. They've always pushed the graphics envelope, and the racing is just what it is, Sim racing. It WON'T stink
If it plays anything like the demo HD Concept demo, it's going to be outstanding. Now I hope GT doesn't fall into the same trap as F1: CE, and TOCA 3 (PS2) where anyone with a wheel can out turn anyone using the analog sticks. That gets frustrating online. I don't to have to spend a whole bunch of extra dollars just to keep up with someone with a wheel. But, I'm still excited!