#gt5

Gran Turismo has featured thousands of cars over the franchise’s history, so it’s no surprise that a few of them were duds.

Can video games really become a reality? Absolutely and if you’re one of our regular readers you probably know how that can happen: the Nissan GT Academy.

Gran Turismo 5 will be getting an update (version 2.02) on December 20th and with it will come the addition of Toyota‘s GT 86 to the game for free. A new downloadable content (DLC) Car Pack 2 will also be available for just $3.99 adding four new cars to your collection.

Happening right now out in Cologne, Germany is Gamescom, the world’s largest trade fair and event for video games and entertainment. And with all the passionate automotive enthusiasts in Germany, it’s no surprise that Sony wanted to make a statement in their booth by teaming up with Audi to show off a whole new way to play Gran Turismo 5. Custom built by quattro GmbH in Neckarsulm, the PlayStation Racing Simulator that’s currently setup at the booth is a full-on carbon-black Audi R8 LMS imitation race car.

The famed creator of Gran Turismo, Kazunori Yamauchi, has returned to racing on the track with a Nissan GT-R that has clearly been inspired by the GT500 “Stealth” GT from Gran Turismo 5. His team recently participated in the four-hour Nurburgring VLN race and looks poised to compete in the 24 Hours of Nurburgring.

AutoGuide.com is giving you the chance to own THE driving simulation game. That’s right, with GT5 having just launched, AutoGuide has obtained two copies and we’ve giving them away to our fans on Facebook.

After having been delayed more times than the second coming, Sony recently announced the o fficial launch date for Gran Turismo 5 as November 24th. But with that many delays there are still skeptics and so Sony has now rolled out its adds in an effort to drum up interest in what will no doubt be the most popular gift this holiday season.

The spot features PlayStation 3 front-man and “VP of Add More Awesome” Kevin Butler, who has made us laugh in pretty much all of PS3’s earlier commercials and this one is no different.

See the commercial, plus an extra Japanese-market ad after the jump:

The time has come for automotive enthusiasts and gamers alike. Gran Turismo 5 has been given an official release date for the umpteenth time this year, with November 24th as the official date.

While we’ve seen many e-retailers do this before, both Target and Amazon have updated the release date of Gran Turismo 5 to show January 1st, 2011 and December 31st, 2010 respectively. It sounds as if they plan on releasing the game at midnight on New Years Day, or this could just be Target and Amazon’s way of playing it safe since Sony did somewhat promise us that GT5 will be released around the holiday season and before year’s end.

Game developers never get much time off, and it looks like the development team for Gran Turismo is already hard at work on the successor to Gran Turismo 5, a game we still have yet to even touch. But now that GT5 has probably gone gold and game discs are being produced, Kazunori Yamauchi, the creative force behind the video game franchise, recently commented in an interview with Autoweek that GT6 is already in the early development stages.

Let’s go ahead and add Gran Turismo 5 delays alongside death and taxes as life’s certainties. Taku Imasaki, Producer over at SCEA has posted the following information up on Sony’s official Playstation blog:

The most high performance vehicle you can obtain in Gran Turismo 5 isn’t a Ferrari, or an Audi Le Mans prototype race car. In fact, it’s not something that actually exists, nor is it a tied to any manufacturer.

No, it’s the Red Bull X1 Prototype, a virtual race car designed to be as realistic as possible while pushing the threshold of what is possible in a high performance machine.

To create the car, Digital Polyphony approached Adrian Newey from Red Bull Racing and asked him what he would envision as a top-tier racecar that had no technical limitations. The result is the X1 Prototype that we’ll inevitably get to experience when Gran Turismo 5 reaches shelves sometime this century…decade…year, maybe. For now, we’re stuck with a video trailer of what the prototype looks like and how it’ll change how we’ll forever think about the future of race cars. Chances that Red Bull makes this thing a reality? Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they find a partner to do it.

Check out the trailer on the X1 Prototype after the break.

[Source: GT Planet]

There is a whole lot going on right now at Tokyo Game Show 2010, including the release of a new trailer for Gran Turismo 5. Yes, the game that everyone has been highly anticipating for what seems like the past decade, is very close to release… we hope.

The trailer shows off just how grand the scope of Gran Turismo 5’s development is. We don’t even have to address just how detailed the courses and vehicles look, or just how accurate everything is expected to be from driving simulator to engine modification. But what’s just going to blow us away (when we finally get our dirty hands on it) is the variety of game play we’ll get to experience.

Forget just fighting your way to obtain licenses and pack up your garage with as many cars as you want. Gran Turismo 5 is going to usher in a new era of driving simulation with so many different racing modes that you’ll be able to experience what it’s like to be a race car driver in all different styles; from NASCAR, to rally racing to vintage street cars.

Will the game be worth the wait? Or will the anticipation and promises kill it before it’s even released? We’re always a little skeptical when something tries to be a jack of all trades and ends up being an ace of none. Let’s hope this isn’t the case with Gran Turismo 5!

Some of us real passionate gamers don’t think Gran Turismo 5 will make it to our grubby little hands anytime soon. But there’s always reason to hope that the company’s continuous delay in releasing the game is well worth the wait. This is probably not one of those highlights that makes us thankful that they delayed the release of the game, but it shows just how thorough GT5 will be.