GTPlanet

The GTPlanet PSN Registry has quickly grown to be the largest organized group of racers in the online world of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue with more than 412 members.  More importantly, it’s going to be the most important set of credentials that you can have when private race rooms come along this fall, as a requirement to compete in officially-sanctioned GTPlanet online events.  In anticipation of this, the Registry’s organizer, Sphinx, is dividing members into separate divisions based upon their performance in an official qualifying time trial.  The new divisions will allow online racers to enjoy much more competitive races with each other this fall, and will give you a good idea of where you stand with the rest of the world (or would that be…the ‘Planet?).

Takau Imasaki’s recent interview at the 2008 Game Developers Conference reveals little new information, but gives us a brief glimpse inside the development of the series and where it may be headed. Imasaki is the SCEA producer responsible for making the GT games more “friendly” to the U.S. market. He takes credit for “speeding up” the original Gran Turismo to give it a more arcade feel – one that he felt would be more popular with stateside gamers. The most interesting part of the interview came when Imasaki was asked about why they planned to release ‘Prologue’ in the first place: “We want to get the experience of developing an online game. By having something out there, you learn from a lot of consumer feedback and learning how consumers play the game online… Microsoft and other companies are light years ahead of us in terms of experience, so we want to get that experience as well.” Check out the full interview below:

Part 2 of the Kazunori Yamauchi interview that we posted yesterday has been uploaded by GTChannel. There isn’t many interesting questions for this second part of the interview, but he did mention an interesting aspect of the online Gran Turismo 5 experience that we haven’t heard before: “users can also create an online community – for example, fans or owners of the GT-R can create a community or team of their own…” It will certainly be interesting to see if this new feature is mentioned down the road as it has a lot of potential to expand on the game’s online arena.

A new interview with Kazunori Yamauchi was just released by GTChannel, where he discusses some interesting things about his own history and projects that he has worked on in the past. His own personal garage consists of a heavily modified Nissan 350Z, a Honda S2000, a Porsche GT3, and a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG which he uses as his daily driver. He also owns two Ford GT’s: one white, and one in gunmetal gray.

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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.