GTPlanet

After years of waiting, we’re about to get a deluge of Gran Turismo 5 and Gran Turismo Mobile news from E3 2009. To help you keep up with it all, I’m happy to announce GTPlanetNews on Twitter - featuring breaking GT-series news from the E3 show floor.  Start following us now!

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to stay on top of GTPlanet - subscribe to our RSS feed (just drag this link to the bookmarks toolbar in your browser), or get each post delivered by email.   Our YouTube channel will also be the source of fresh GT5 and GT Mobile clips over the next few days, so be sure to hit the big yellow “Subscribe” button over there.  This is the week you’ve been waiting for - keep watching GTPlanet and you won’t miss a thing!

You know exactly what features you want in Gran Turismo 5, but how many people out there actually agree with you?  It’s easy enough to peruse our Gran Turismo 5 forum, but even the most popular ideas get lost in the sea of discussions and opinions.  That’s why we’ve launched ideas.gtplanet.net, a new type of forum that lets you submit and vote on the features, cars, and tracks that you most want to see in future updates to the Gran Turismo series.  The ultimate goal is to efficiently utilize GTPlanet’s large audience to communicate what we, the fans, are most looking for from Polyphony Digital.  To keep things organized, the GTPlanet Ideas site is divided into three categories, or forums:

• Most Wanted Game Features
• Most Wanted Cars
• Most Wanted Tracks

If you’re a regular in our forums, you may have seen this section of our site mentioned before.  Regardless of the “soft launch”, we’ve already seen over 10,000 votes for new ideas - now throw in some of your own, and let your voice be heard!

As we move into 2009, expect to see some nifty and fresh changes to GTPlanet.  The first is a transition away from our old video platform, and on to something you’ve probably heard of before: YouTube.  Hosting our videos with YouTube offers quite a few advantages.  If you have your own YouTube account, you can subscribe to GTPlanet’s channel and receive regular updates via email when we upload new clips.  The best news, however, is our ability to upload full 720p high-definition video, which we will be embedding here in our news posts whenever we can.

The channel, of course, is brand new, and if you are a regular reader or GT news junkie, there probably isn’t much that you haven’t seen before.  Otherwise, sit back and enjoy this bit of our video library in glorious high definition.  To see just how good it looks, take a look at this clip of Kazunori Yamauchi’s monumental presentation at the 2006 Tokyo Game Show, where he first announced many of the online features and functionality that we keep wishing for each day.  Check out the video after the jump, and remember - if you’ve got your own clips that you’d like to see us feature on the channel, send us an email!

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Those of you who have received invitations to Sony’s PlayStation Home service - listen up!  GTPlanet user Marky264 discovered that if you create a Japanese profile on your PS3 (learn how to do that here), the Tokyo Game Show 2008 “booth” becomes available.  Once inside, you’ll find the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue ‘racing pods’ that we first saw early last month.  Once aquired, they can be placed in your virtual ‘home’, and will surely play an integral role in private online race events in the future.  Learn more about how to find the racing pods and the TGS booth in Marky’s forum thread.

I am very happy to announce GTPlanet’s latest venture into the world of online video with GranTurismoTV.com! This is the first online video channel dedicated to the Gran Turismo series, and we anticipate it to fill up quickly with lots of new Gran Turismo 5 content on the horizon. The new site also represents the next stage in the evolution of our online community, as users will be able to quickly and easily upload their own content to be featured. The GranTurismoTV.com video player is also completely “embeddable”, so you can display our videos on your own forum or blog posts. Here’s a quick sample of the new player, showing the Japanese intro movie from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

For years, I’ve always had a hard time updating the main page of the site. Our previous software was clunky and out of date, and posting new articles was a real pain - definitely not something that is fun to do by any measure. Now, however, we’re using WordPress, and I look forward to easily adding new content on a frequent basis. WordPress will also allow others to contribute articles here on the main site, which is a feature I look forward to taking advantage of. Feel free to use this post as a test of the comments system. Remember, you will need to create a new account to post comments as this section of the site is not connected with our forum database.