Boomtown X

Sony has released the latest update to Gran Turismo 5, bringing the game up to version v1.10.

New features include racing gear items, limited time triple prize money and many other features.

Full changelog after the break.

Any of you tackled the 24 hour endurance event in Gran Turismo 5 yet? No, thought not. The problem with Gran Turismo 5 is that you can't save mid-race, rather essential for races lasting 24 hours.

Le Mans 24 Hours had such a save feature on PlayStation 2 a whole generation ago¹.

However Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi has tweeted the good news that mid-race saves are something that are being worked on for GT5 and will be incorporated into a future update.

"I’m sorry. Game saves during endurances. They are currently under development," he wrote.

Source: GTPlanet

_{¹Though it didn't actually work and instead just corrupted your save instead. Thanks a bunch guys. Yes I am still bitter about it.}

Gran Turismo 5 may feature over 1000 cars but many of these are Standard models - that is, cars with lower resolution textures and no internal view.

Now series creation Kazunor Yamauchi has told Famitsu Magazine that some of these cars are going to recieve a makeover into Premium models.

How many of these - and more importantly how much this will cost us - isn't known yet.

Source: GT Planet

Sony has announced this morning that it has shipped over 5.5 million copies of the PlayStation 3 driving game Gran Turismo 5. While not the same as units sold it still shows impressive demand for Polyphony Digital's long-awaited sequel.

In further figures released by Sony we are told that the Gran Turismo franchise has a whole has shipped 60 million units.

Another day, and more news of a planned update for Gran Turismo 5, the flawed diamond from Polyphony Digital.

Series creator Kazunori Yamauchi has already said we can expect a damage update for the game this month but now Adriasang reports that another update will be release towards the end of December that "will include an option for backing up your save data to other storage devices."

At this rate the game might actually be finished by this time next year. How about the option to turn the HUD off soon?

Kudos to Kazunori Yamauchi, in a series of Twitter posts he's addressing the questions of Gran Turismo 5 players and admits the ugly shadows are a problem and are due to "dynamic and wide-area lighting needs." He went on to say he hopes they can be improved via patching.

We're also going to see an update to the game later this month that adds mechanical damage. Only visual damage is fully featured in the latter stages of the game at present - though mechanical damage has featured in various event demos of the game prior to release.

Other good news is that Yamauchi is considering giving players the option to remove the HUD - which rather obscures the attractive premium car interiors.

For more on Yamauchi's GT5 responses head over to GTPlanet.

As we said in our review the core of GT5 is very good indeed but the game is beset by problems. Our hope is these are fixed rather than having to wait until GT6. Thankfully it sounds like Polyphony Digital is working on fixing many of these issues.

Unfocused, late and unfinished. One gets the impression and exasperated Sony Japan wandered into Yamauchi-san's office and scooped up whatever was on his desk at the time and released that as Gran Turismo 5.

Polyphony Digital's unfinished symphony - Gran Turismo 5 - has entered the UK charts at number one this week.

I expect Call of Duty: Black Ops will be back on top next week.

All formats week ending 27 November 2010

1 GRAN TURISMO 5 SONY COMPUTER ENT. -
2 CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS ACTIVISION 1
3 ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD UBISOFT 2
4 FIFA 11 EA SPORTS 4
5 JUST DANCE 2 UBISOFT 5
6 NEED FOR SPEED: HOT PURSUIT EA GAMES 3
7 WII PARTY NINTENDO 6
8 ART ACADEMY NINTENDO -
9 WII SPORTS RESORT NINTENDO 7
10 FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS BETHESDA SOFTWORKS 13
11 PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE LOST FUTURE NINTENDO 8
12 KINECT SPORTS MICROSOFT 9
13 WII FIT PLUS NINTENDO 11
14 RED DEAD REDEMPTION: UNDEAD NIGHTMARE ROCKSTAR -
15 HARRY POTTER: THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 EA GAMES 20
16 SONIC COLOURS SEGA 18
17 NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII NINTENDO 10
18 WWE SMACKDOWN VS RAW 2011 THQ 14
19 LEGO HARRY POTTER: YEARS 1-4 WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE -
20 MARIO KART WII NINTENDO -

Source: ChartTrack/UKIE

Gran Turismo 5 creator Kazunori Yamauchi says that there will be an online update for the game this weekend to resolve issues players are having joining multiplayer games and the online congestion that is even stalling single player gameplay.

"We received a lot of demands for having more regulations placed on the online play. We’re going to perform an update on the 27th that will include things like max power restrictions and weight restrictions. It’s like a living creature, dynamically growing as we speak. I think it’s going to be hard to find an end to that process.

"The data centre was set up to handle 500,000 connections but the number of connections we received greatly exceeded that amount and there was a high chance of experiencing problems as a result.“The design of the GT game really integrates the online and offline parts. So the problems online actually affected the offline play as well. Right now we’ve changed the number of simultaneous connections that are possible to one million, doubling the number, and we’re trying to gauge what will happen, but we don’t know at this point in time."

All well and good, but the game is absolutely riddled with other problems, faults, anomalies and terrible design decisions.

Source: Eurogamer

We've just been playing around with Gran Turismo 5's photo mode. Check out our photographic efforts in full resolution after the jump.

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Many gamers found it almost impossible to play Gran Turismo 5 last night as Sony struggled to cope with the PSN traffic the launch of the game has generated.

Gran Turismo's ambitious online integration means that the game is constantly communicating with PSN even during the single player game. The network problems resulted in the game crashing for some users will others had to wait minutes to move from one menu to the next.

We experienced the menu issue for ourselves and even saw the cursor disappear making it impossible to navigate the game.

There is a simple cure to avoid these issues - sign out of PSN - but of course then you lose all the online functionality.

Poor show Sony.

We wondering if GT5 would ever arrive at BTX towers, but this morning the postman pitched up with some birthday presents for me (it's on Saturday, yes thanks for asking I'd like a Marshall AFD100 amplifier please) and an envelope from Sony containing our review code for Gran Turismo 5.

Obviously that's not really left enough time for us to review the game today or this week for that matter. So I thought I would share my initial impressions in the form of two lists, the good and the bad.

Here we go...