Microsoft is continuing to be kind to racers on Xbox One, with another racing title lined up for the “Games With Gold” program. April saw the juggernaut of Project CARS 2 join Games With Gold, but May’s title is a little more obscure.
The one-off events are coming thick and fast in GT Sport, with Audi revealing its second this month. This new Audi e-tron Vision Gran Turismo Challenge is part of the brand’s #RaceHome campaign, which it’s running both to keep its professional drivers and its fans busy while much of the world is cooped up at home.
It’s hard to believe, but Gran Turismo 3 turns 19 today. Initially launched on April 28 2001 for the Japanese market — arriving in July in both Europe and the USA — GT3 was the debut Gran Turismo title for the PlayStation 2 console, and an important milestone.
This coming week is one of Japan’s biggest annual holidays: Golden Week. To celebrate — and also to mark the hiatus in world affairs right now — GT Sport and Red Bull are running a competition in the game.
The virtual world continues to fill in for the real world this week, as the motorsport action returns to small screens and static driving rigs to provide the racing entertainment that would otherwise be absent.
Update: On May 8, Polyphony Digital pushed out a new set of Terms and Conditions in the UK for the game’s FIA mode, which modified the “Prizes” section. Previous versions of the rules included laid out Live Event attendance as a prize — including flights, transfers, hotel, and meals — with a value of around $3,000, and trophies where applicable.
In recent weeks we’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of otherwise idle F1 drivers getting into the world of sim-racing. McLaren’s Lando Norris and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen were already heavily involved, but almost half the grid is now racing online of a weekend.
Snow has descended upon the UK once again in Forza Horizon 4, marking the start of a fresh Winter season. Buried among the snow drifts are a new set of events and content.
Players booting up their PS4s this morning will discover that the 1.57 update for GT Sport has arrived. It comes in at just over half a gigabyte, weighing in at 503MB. That’s enough to bring a little bit of new content, but the update’s main focus is on changes to Sport Mode.
As the next console generation continues to gather pace, Microsoft appears to come up with something new for the official logo for its flagship Xbox Series X.
After circumstances dictated that Polyphony Digital had to transmute the original first ten races of the 2020 FIA Season into an Exhibition Series, it’s ready to start again for real. The official 2020 FIA Online Championship season restarts this coming Saturday, April 25.
The outside world might be in all kinds of disarray, but GT Sport’s Daily Race schedule continues unhindered. This week we’ve got three more races, which include a track we haven’t seen in the rotation for a very, very long time.
The professional racing drivers of the world are still sitting idle as tracks remain closed and large gatherings are banned. That means they have plenty of time on their hands to get involved in the new breed of esports events which fill the gap until society returns to normal (and hopefully beyond).