Following up after his drive in Daijiro Yoshihara’s professional drift car, Kazunori Yamauchi sat down with the Formula D champion for a brief interview now available on GTChannel.

Two of the largest retailers in the United States will be selling Gran Turismo 5: XL Edition for just $10.00 in their “Black Friday” sales, which kick off the holiday shopping season.

Aside from looking forward to the second installment of this very feature, I’ve had quite the busy week and you’ll all be glad to know it included a fair dosage of GT5; a game I’ve been playing more and more since last week. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I’m still quite a long way from being as interested in the game as I was in late 2010 when the game hit the shelves but that doesn’t mean I can’t come back to it from time-to-time to enjoy several lapping sessions, some photo sessions and maybe even some senseless spending of credits on cars I already have — how is that not fun?

As previously announced, GTPlanet has teamed up with Nissan to host a live Twitter party during Thursday night’s episode of GT Academy 2012, which aired on Spike TV at 11:30pm ET in the United States.

The latest round of Seasonal Events are now available in Gran Turismo 5, in the form of new Time & Drift trials featuring the Honda or Acura NSX. The challenges are as follows:

Following the end of the accompanying RTL “reality TV” GT Academy show, the German GT Academy winner’s identity has been revealed as 25 year old Peter Pyzera.

This weekend marks the return of Formula 1 to the United States, in Austin, Texas, at the 2012 United States Grand Prix, and if the chatter in our forums is any indication, lots of GTPlanet community members will be attending.

During his recent trip to Las Vegas for SEMA and the 2012 Gran Turismo Awards, Kazunori Yamauchi had a chance to get behind the wheel of Daijiro Yoshihara’s (2011 Formula D Champion) Discount Tire/Falken Tire S13 drift car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLI_q7Ev9qk

Two very curious reported discoveries in GTPlanet’s Forums are attracting quite a bit of attention today.

Welcome to the first installment of the Weekly Rewind, a feature where the primary focus will be you, the GTPlanet community. Of course that means there’s going to be plenty to discuss over the lifetime of this feature, so if you’ve been sitting idly by waiting for your time to shine among our brightest stars this may very well be the perfect opportunity for you. Continuing from that, there’s plenty to get through in this first installment as the community here has been ever-so-busy, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

A new batch of A-Spec Seasonal Events are now available in Gran Turismo 5, featuring Honda’s iconic Civic. Cars may have no more than 415pp and tires can be no better than Comfort/Soft.

As you have probably heard by now, GT5‘s 2.09 update launched last night and brought with it some of the most interesting changes to the game in quite some time, addressing many common player complaints, including the sound of the Honda Weider HSV-010.

The latest update for Gran Turismo 5 is now available, and offers a few minor tweaks along with a timely change (given one of the questions in my recent interview with Kazunori Yamauchi) to the engine sound of the Honda Weider HSV-010.

Polyphony Digital has just released revised sales numbers for the Gran Turismo series as of September 2012.

Before the 2012 GT Awards, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kazunori Yamauchi for a brief interview. We covered a wide range of topics, and I tried to cover some of the most frequently asked questions and discussed topics in GTPlanet’s forums.

The 2012 Gran Turismo Awards were held last night in Las Vegas, where Kazunori Yamauchi himself selected the David Eckert’s Ford Mach Forty as “Best in Show” from among the five category finalists.

Kazunori Yamauchi toured the show floor at SEMA in Las Vegas today, visiting all of the individual category winners in this year’s Gran Turismo Awards. They are:

The latest round of Seasonal Events are now available in Gran Turismo 5, in the form of new Time & Drift trials featuring Nissan’s own supercar, the Skyline GT-R . The challenges are as follows:

As hobbies go, gaming tends to attract the stigma of being solitary, sedentary and for geeks. The image of the slacker playing games in his mom’s basement is tough to shake off and online gaming doesn’t do much to help.