It’s official - SCEA announced today the April 17 North American ship date for Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, available exclusively for PS3. Developed by famed Polyphony Digital, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will be available for $39.99 on Blu-ray Disc (BD) and as a download via the PLAYSTATION Store.
Sony release schedule reveals date and price of upcoming racer.
The prologue to the fifth Gran Turismo is due to hit shelves on the 28th March, and will be priced at £24.99. A downloadable version of the game is also due.
GTGT5: Prologue March 5 Prologue is set to contain ten tracks, 37 vehicles, and four game modes, and is one of the most anticipated games for the Playstation 3.
The game now includes options for "Online" and "Ranking." "Ranking," is an online ranking viewer. You can filter rankings by track, car type, tire type, and even physics mode (standard or professional). The game lets you view and save replays for the top racers on each track. The real meat of the update is in the Online mode. On this first day of online play, the game has just four live race events against other racers and four time trials where you attempt to beat other players' best times.
There are those in this industry that cry with anticipation for a new Halo. Others for a new Mario. I'm neither of those. My kryptonite has, and always will be, the most ambitious racing franchise in existence: Gran Turismo. For the past ten years now, Gran Turismo has been Sony's most successful franchise, in addition to being one of the most popular in the world. With only four games under its belt, the series has sold an astonishing 50 million copies to date
The real, full Gran Turismo 5 is due out Holiday 2008, at best, so to please the legion of GT fans (or cash in shamelessly, depending on your point of view), Sony CEJ just released Gran Turismo 5: Prologue in Japan. Obligatory stats: 37 cars, 5 tracks, $40 via Japanese PSN or about $50 if you import a disk (PS3 is region-free, so guess your way through the menus and you can play with little difficulty)."
Sony's Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has made its debut in the Japanese charts at number three, selling 116,000 copies according to data from Media Create.
However, it's the only PlayStation 3 title in the top twenty, with Nintendo Wii and DS product clogging up the charts for the week ended December 16.
It seems that PSP owners will have to wait even longer for Gran Turismo to hit the portable scene. A PSP version of Gran Turismo 4 was planned for the handheld's launch in 2005 and now it is looking to be released during 2009.
I don't know if they make any money from this, but this would be so perfect: I love the adds, they add a lot of realism to the scene and look great, in the meanwhile advertisers can be happy that their adds get such great exposure, could be willing to pay and thus lower prices for the consumer resulting in larger install base and so on... though chances are we aren't there yet and that money will just go to cover development costs... though if games are to compete with movies/tv at some point or another they will have to go to lower prices, not to mention that people get tv for free...
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i deleted my previous article submission about the release date because this item has more information and is more "official"