I thought you were leaving.
Like it or not, Gran Turismo is being held hostage by SONY. I'm pretty sure Kazunori is content with some of the cloak-n-dagger secrecy, after Microsoft basically took his concept without so much as a few backhanded thank you's. At first. But it's also clear from his discomfort, especially at last year's E3, that he's being forced into this by SONY and doesn't like misleading people in order to play corporate political games with the competition. In spite of his lofty title, he is, after all, just another SONY employee in the Japanese way of doing things. So he, and we, are stuck with whatever SONY Japan decides. It's not very nice, but we have to deal with it.
In a way, I can understand all this because SONY produced a stunning masterpiece of hardware in the PS3, but because of the price, or American adoration of Microsoft - God,
why?? - or whatever reason, the western media turned on SONY big time, and it was hard for a couple of years to get any kind of balance from them regarding anything to do with the PS3. Even stellar PS3 games weren't given a fair shake, and even to this day, one more pixel in a 360 screen gets a PS3 game a sneer.
All this costs SONY a lot of money, especially with a recycled GameCube eating up a lot of the gaming market. They have to fight for every yen, dollar and euro they can. They've been stupid about a number of things, to be sure, like shoveling GT PSP out the door first, but it meant valuable sales and much needed money. Without money, there would be no Gran Turismo.
Yes, we're in the dark. But we also have short memories. Every new discovery gets us excited. But that lasts... what, a week? If that? People want screenshots of new cars to see how good they are. Well, there's freaking Prologue and the TT demo. You can do more than look at these cars. You can even race online in Prologue, or go up against 15 pretty darn well driven A.I. competitors. The physics in the TT demo are just incredible! Everything we know now indicates that we'll be blown away when GT5 fires up on our PS3s. But after a day or two, that doesn't stick in the ADD minds of half the kids on the net. They want a steady stream of goodies and freebies. They don't get it, they rant on a board all day.
And hardly anyone considers that more time means a GT5 with more content. Maybe we'll get all those tracks from the past GT games. Maybe we'll get a full blown livery editor. More cars. Dynamic weather and time of day transition. Who knows.
I do know that I'm tired of those who supposedly have always adored Gran Turismo but are now officially done with it. Awesome. Go away. Get a 360 and touch yourselves over a buggy FW3 without online public lobbies. Go rant on the Forza boards. And see how long that lasts...
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