Top Gear on Gran Turismo TV for 99¢

As you may recall, today (June 30, 2011) was supposedly the last for GT5 Prologue’s online services. For unknown and unexplained reasons, Polyphony Digital has announced the service’s end-of-life has now been delayed (yes, there’s a lot of jokes to be made there) to September 30, 2011.

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.

Just when you thought you’d explored every nook and cranny of GT5 Prologue and finally laid the game to rest, it’s back from the dead with one more surprise up its sleeve: a super-secret “Special” menu. As revealed by @Mathieulh on Twitter, the Special menu gives you access to lots of hidden features. Notably, it shows several more tracks in the game such as the Nurburgring Nordschleife, Circuit de la Sarthe, and Tsukuba (though they can’t actually be selected). You can make all the cars available, create a race and specify the make and model of each of your opponents, tinker with visible menu options, and more.

Programmers from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Society of Automotive Engineers have found an interesting way to build “green racing” features on top of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. Apparently, the system works by sitting between the steering wheel and the PlayStation 3, watching and recording controller inputs.

GTPlanet user Calcifer has been hard at work developing a unique application for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android platforms: it lets you view the latest top 100 times posted to the GT5 Prologue in-game leader boards! This provides a quick way to check rankings without having to shuffle through Prologue’s menus, or just look at the status of your own hot laps regardless of where you are. The app is available for free on both the iTunes App Store (direct link here) and the Android Marketplace (QR code available here) – or just search the applications for “gran turismo” and you should find it quickly on either platform.

According to a report by VideoGamesZone.de, Gran Turismo 5* is at Berlin’s IFA trade show…in 3D. The news comes off Sony’s press conference at the show, focusing on their consumer electronics products. The theme of IFA seems to echo what all the big players first started promoting at CES last January: 3D movies and games.

If you’ve seen lots of pictures and videos from the show floor at last week’s GamesCom convention, you probably noticed this full-size, Audi TT motion simulator running what appears to be a special version of Gran Turismo 5: Prologue.  While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a motion simulator hooked up to a copy of GT (indeed, this same Audi was brought to the Leipzig Games Convention last year), you can only imagine how badly manufactures of consumer-grade “motion seats” would love to interface their own products with future GT titles…

As you may know, Polyphony Digital publishes the sales figures of each Gran Turismo game on their website, and they just updated the numbers for Gran Turismo 5: Prologue.  In the last four months (going by the numbers from May), the game has sold approximately 700,000 copies, bringing the total to nearly 4,000,000.  No doubt, the Greatest Hits price drop helped drive retail sales, despite the fact that prices // continue to fall on eBay.  Regardless, this is an impressive milestone for a “small” game – and one which will, no doubt, pour fuel on the the fire of the endless GT / Forza debate…

With the quickly falling price of GT5 Prologue continuing to drive sales of the little game, many folks who have been holding off are finally picking it up.  Despite its small size, however, it still manages in-depth gameplay – the intricacies of which can be daunting for even experienced players.  To help out, GTPlanet user Conquerer put together this impressive, comprehensive walkthrough that leaves no stone unturned.