Photomode image courtesy of EDK.

First mentioned at GT5’s Madrid launch party, the next round of the European GT Academy has been officially announced! The online time trials kick off Friday, March 4 and will continue through Sunday, April 17th. Players from 10 different countries, grouped by “territories”, will be eligible to participate:

Photomode image courtesy of EDK.

Woops! Borrowing a page from PD there, we didn’t have an update last week about the 10th week of the Photomode Competitions. We’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled program next week, but for now, here’s what’s going on this week in the Photomode sub-forum:

Wow! In an unprecedented move (and on a Sunday morning, no less), SCEA has just announced the cancellation of Round 2 in GT Academy USA, due to more abuse and “wall-banging” on Rome and Madrid. All participants who qualified for Round 2 will be automatically moving on to Round 3. The start of round 3, previously scheduled to begin on February 14th, is now “subject to change” pending the next GT5 update, which has been confirmed to introduce more sophisticated corner-cutting and wall-banging detection mechanisms to “prevent this type of inappropriate driving”.

On their Japanese website, Polyphony Digital has formally announced they’ll be pulling the plug on GT5 Prologue’s servers June 30th of this year. The game had a very good run, selling over 5 million copies since its release in Japan back in December of 2007.

Sony and Polyphony Digital have, fortunately, acted quickly to resolve the issues with corner-cutting in round 2 of GT Academy USA. All times for the Indianapolis Road Course have been removed, and the track has been replaced with a new custom-built circuit known as “Eifel 102A”. As with Indy, the  Nür (R34) is the only available car. The round will still end at its regularly scheduled time (February 6th at midnight, EST).

Photomode image courtesy of Anghammarad.