In an interview with the Weekly Famitsu magazine in Japan, Gran Turismo 5 producer Kazunori Yamauchi has divulged a few new details about Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Here’s a rundown:
* There is a PlayStation Home icon on the game’s menu screen. Within the Home universe, players will be able to enter the top menu of the game from Home, or vice-versa by selecting the respective icons.
* When the game starts, a "My Page" screen will also appear. In the final version, Yamauchi hopes to include a friends list as well. There will be several background images for the My Page screen such as Tokyo and other cities, but will also include sceneries of both outdoors and indoors. There will even be a weather forecast displayed so that other players will know which geographic location you are in and how the weather is there.
* Prologue will include 2 online modes, one of which includes chat features. The other will not.
* There will be about 40 cars and 4 courses with 8 different layouts.
* Prologue will not have downloadable cars and courses.
* Prologue is a mixture of the GT and Arcade modes. Players can earn reward money from each race to purchase new cars. There will be normal cars and tuned cars, but players cannot tune their own cars in this version. The save data from Prologue (such as money earned and cars purchased) can be carried over to Gran Turismo 5.
* 16 cars can participate in a single race in offline mode. This may drop to 12 cars in online mode.
* There are two control methods. "Normal Mode" based on simulation engine and "Professional Mode" based on actual car behavior and physics.
* Yamauchi hopes to include B-spec mode but it is still not decided at this point.
That’s quite a bit of information on the upcoming racer. It will hit store shelves in Japan this October. A U.S. date has yet to be announced.
