Gran Turismo HD Becomes Free Download

The Opposable Thumbs blog mentions a surprising twist from the world of Sony products; Gran Turismo HD will now be a free download. The realistic racing title was slated to be released as a full game, but the word is now that Polyphony will be releasing what they have, via e-Distribution, in Japan and the U.S.. Instead of continuing work on GT HD, they'll focus on Gran Turismo 5, the next 'full' game in the series. From the article: "In Japan there will be a free download that includes ten cars and two layouts of a single track. Not exactly an embarrassment of riches, but hey, free is free. There is no hint at when we'll see this download in the US, but I don't think it will be too long. Gran Turismo isn't exactly a small property here, and a free taste of the game in full 1080p will give gamers something to show off to other car buffs on their shiny HDTVs."

Better than $800.

[Spazntwich]

But kind of slim pickings. In all this time all they ever managed to finish were 10 cars and a few tracks?

You'd think at the very least they could just take their models and tracks from GT4, give the textures some high res treatment, maybe up the polygons in a few places, and at least hand out a more thorough product.

Other cars sold seperatley...

[SuperKendall]

We'll probably see other tracks and cars, just sold independantly - they already have all the models done at this point...

Re:

[davebo357]

They're whole scheme for selling cars and tracks individually took a lot of slack from fans. I think they got enough work done on GT HD and people complained enough about the online selling of cars and tracks that they just said hey, we've got all the cars ready, lets just release some stuff for free, make a few new tracks then call it GT5. Which suits me just fine. I wasn't excited about GT4 HD at all, but between GT5 and the next GTA, I might one day actually buy a ps3.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to sound like a fanboi (I will probably get a ps3 *someday*) but it would seem to make more sense in your particular case to save $200 and buy a 360 since it will have GTA the same day as the PS3, and go with Forza 2 which supports MS' wireless racing wheel which has been getting rave reviews.

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[WilliamTS99]

Then tack on another $200 if you want the external HD-DVD drive to go with it.

Re:

[Jace of Fuse!]

And why would anyone need that to play games?

Oh, you mean to maybe watch HD-DVD movies on?

What if one is more of a GAMER than a movie watcher?

Oh? Yeah, I guess you didn't know that some of us don't watch too many movies, huh?

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[WilliamTS99]

Or once games start taking up more space then is available on DVD, might not be all that far off.

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[twistedsymphony]

It wont happen, the way the console's security is setup it can' run code from the HD-DVD player. It's movies only... and that's it.

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[WilliamTS99]

Well that would prevent a problem. Is this something that can be changed by one of their flash updates that they force on everyone?

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[supabeast!]

In all this time all they ever managed to finish were 10 cars and a few tracks?

Polyphony Digital is notoriously slow when it comes to just about everything. I'd actually have been more surprised if they had actually gotten the game out sometime before holiday 2008. This just confirms what I already suspected; Sony has no faith in Polyphony Digital's ability to get a game finished, and was planning to do a neutered game and then sell more content when it was finally finished, instead they caved in and just m

Not first Gran Turismo HD game..

[Junta]

I played Gran Turismo 4 in 1080i. It's the one and only PS2 game to support it, afaik. Technically HD, but admittedly since the geometric complexity was still PS2 levels it wasn't that much better...

Re:

[Junta]

I will say that on my set some detail seemed to be obvious in the backdrop suggesting somehow it was more than a simple upsample. However, I was very disappointed that, effectively, 1080i didn't look appreciably less aliased than normal. Maybe some 2D textures are larger, but 3D models were indeed rendered in low res and upsampled?

Aliasing has always been my biggest gripe about PS2. Sure, geometric complexity is nice to improve, but aliasing has been the most jarring thing in 3D graphics to me.

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[UnknownSoldier]

I agree. Take a look at the intro for SotC (Shadows of the Colussus) The swimming textures is almost enough to make me barf.

Thank God Sony went to nVidia for their GPU on the PS3...

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[twistedsymphony]

Aliasing is easily the biggest turn-off for me with the PS3. Nearly every title has jaggies coming out of everywhere.

It's hard to notice from screenshots because most of them are down-sampled from their native resolution to fit better in a browser, effectively super-sampling the image. But if you get a chance to play a kiosk or visit a friend with a PS3 and an HDTV they're quite apparent

Sony seems to be banking on the High resolutions to wave the need for FSAA, granted it's not nearly as bad as the ja

Didn't GT4 Prologue offer HD also?

[BancBoy]

I had a lot of fun with that title. Can't remember though.

The first thing Sony has done right for the PS3

[EvilCabbage]

Seriously. Upon seeing this news I have gone from "No chance of wanting a PS3" to thinking "Shit, might just have to pick one up after the Australian launch".

I am a Gran Turismo whore of the highest order....

Beware the wingged pig!

[Broken scope]

Sony did something right. HOLY SHIT!

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[SalaciousPucker]

I wouldn't say they did something right, but rather, right something that was going very wrong. They planned on taking a flagship game and tainting it with micro-payment stank. Even ignoring the fact that it was floating a sketchy pay-model on a last generation game, it would not have been real popular. So, they bit the cost for developing it in exchange for some PR. Good move by Sony and that hasn't been said enough in 2006.

might be good

[joe 155]

I was particularly angry with what they were going to do, ie. sell it as a full game and then charge loads for cars etc, so naturally this is good news for anyone who actually has a ps3 (I'm in the UK so even if I wanted on I'm still waiting 'till about march 07). One thing that worried me though is "Instead of continuing work on GT HD, they'll focus on Gran Turismo 5, the next 'full' game in the series." I hope that the game is at least finished properly, even if not as expansive as it was meant to be, a shodily made game that crashes or has bad mapping is almost worse than no game...

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[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm right with you. I am actually ok with them giving a game away for free where you have to buy the components and I think that model could work for them in the future. But what pissed everybody off was the fact that they were essentially saying "yeah, we're selling you the full game...but uh....you have to buy all this other crap online for way more if you want it to be worth playing". Full my ass.

Sony... a good move?

[Trojan35]

Sony's realized that all those people who bought PS3's have gone back to playing GoW on their 360 or playing party games on their Wii. The PS3's launch, despite the sellout, was disasterous. I haven't heard one good review of the system yet. They don't have a killer game.... hell they've only got one decent game (RFOM). The game is basically CoD3 with aliens.

How do they solve it? They bring a killer-game early. They release GT HD as a free download and get a few people to buy the system just for that game. Kinda genius really: Good will from a free game, system-mover, doesn't lose the sales they'd get from a full GT game.

They still have quite a way to go. The 360 has a very good library going, and the Wii is fun as hell. But this kind of outside the box thinking is something Sony has been lacking and it's a good move.

Killer App: YDL

[rockmuelle]

"...I haven't heard one good review of the system yet. They don't have a killer game.... "

For games, I completely agree. Most of the launch titles are pretty lame. However, there is one app that's made the $500 and $600 boxes worth it (yeah, we bought one of each): Yellow Dog Linux. I've been developing for the Cell BE for a few months now (on loaner systems) and have not had this much fun programming hardware since I built a processor as an undergrad. Compared to the $8-20k that the IBM and Mercury Cell systems go for, the PS3 is a bargin.

YDL on the PS3 has all the same patches and SDKs as the official FC5 Cell BE Linux distro. The PS3 has the added benefit of a graphics card. We plugged ours into the 24" Dell widescreen displays and are running at full WUXGA resolution. The graphics are framebuffered and not accelerated, but for number crunching, this is not an issue (though it would be fun to use the GPUs, too). The only downside is that only 6 SPUs are exposed from Linux (there are 8 on the high-end systems, 7 avaiable to PS3 games).

-Chris

Re:Killer App: YDL

[rockmuelle]

"What do you use this for other than just to tinker with?"

High-performance (e.g. scientific, bioinformatics, financial) software development. For about $5k, you can have a teraflop cluster.

We're seeing speedups of 2-50x over VMX (AltiVec) enhanced PPC970 tools when they're rewritten for the SPUs. Of course, the challenge is rewritting apps for a new architecture. We're discovering that the memory pipelines and processors on heterogeneous multi-core processors (e.g. Cell) are different enough to warrant complete rewrites. The good news is that the performance benefit is worth the effort to refactor performance-critical portions of applications. Incidentally, we're also working on development tools to ease the refactoring process.

-Chris

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[moloko_synthemesc]

So the next (maybe first?) killer app for PS3 will be....Turbotax??
Awesome!! :P

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[Anonymous Coward]

"The only downside is that only 6 SPUs are exposed from Linux (there are 8 on the high-end systems, 7 avaiable to PS3 games)."

AFAIK games only use 6 too. The 7th is reserved for the PS3 OS to do background tasks.

Glad someone is getting some use out of PS3 linux, anyway. It's quite a console milestone, and I'm surprised Slashdot in general isn't more interested.

Maybe not in the US?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamespot reported the same thing yesterday, but nothing was said of a possible US (or anywhere else) release of this. For now it's Japan only, a bonus for the disillusioned Japanese who don't really have the system (since there's like 100k only out there for them).

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[drinkypoo]

Japan has 100,000 units and 127M people. the US has 200,000 units, and 298M people. Japan actually has more PS3s per capita, at least until the next round.