Ramblings 005

Gran Turismo

I'm not remotely interested in the Gran Turismo games, but thought this info (ripped from the-magicbox) was pretty interesting;

Kazunori Yamauchi revealed new tidbits of Gran Turismo 5 for PS3:

- Gran Turismo 5 will be released in Christmas 2008.

- It takes 6 months to design a car and one year to design a full race track. Currently 30 staff are working on race tracks.

- Gran Turismo Portable for PSP is intended to connect with GT5.

- Yamauchi only stayed home four days since he started working in the Gran Turismo series 15 years ago.

- There were only 15 staff when Gran Turismo 1 started, today there are 120 people in Polyphony Digital.

- Both Ferrari and Suzuka will be in GT5, they will look exactly like the real thing.

- He would be frustrated if working with Wii because he knows PS3 is a much more powerful console.

- He thinks Xbox 360 is not a Full HD console, because not a lot of games are running in 1080p at 60fps.

- Yamauchi wants to work on a lengthy RPG.

- Damage model is still around, but probably with compromises due to agreements with manufacturers.

- Some manufacturers prohibit damage models for their vehicles, so at the end some vehicles will not have damage models.

Dragonball Z

I find it interesting that the new Dragonball game, Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit, looks better than the cartoon series. I think Burst Limit is the newest iteration of Budokai, which (I think) started on the Gamecube and then moved onto the PS2. I started playing the series from Budokai 2, I then played Budokai 3 very briefly and then got bored. There's been loads of sequels since then, Burst Limit looks like it'll play almost exactly the same, but with prettier graphics. It'll have online play though, which I think would work well in a "Budokai" game, because fighting consists of strings of button pressing that requires less speed and timing than other more professional fighters like Virtua Fighter and Street Fighter. The games more to do with watching fancy looking automated super combos than anything else. These kinds of things don't need to be viewed in real time, so if the programmers are clever, they could hide a lot of the lag.