A New Project Gotham Screen - Whet, Whet, Whet!

"It is believed that Polyphony will be debuting Gran Turismo 5 in non-playable form, highlighting the work that has been poured into the key update over the past few years."

So while Microsoft is showing games, Sony will continue to show movies? Interesting.

I guess that's all Sony and Polyphony will be able to offer over the next, what, 3 years? How long delayed was GT4? and they ended up taking out the features they were trumpeting the whole time (namely, online)!

I wasn't anti-Sony before (I love my original PS), but after this E3, and the statements of their employees bashing the other consoles, they sure are asses.

Oh, nice screenshot.

Oh look! More over-shiny cars in realistic, under-populated cities.

One would think, with all the power of the 360, they could get some decent Fresnel shaders for those reflective sufaces. Oh, and volumetric smoke still appears to be out of reach, resulting in smoke comprising a bunch of overlaid semi-transparent "sprites" that cut off neatly as they pass through other objects. Kinda like smoke effects have been since the 8-bit days...

PGR3 gets this SPOnGaloid's heart pumping at about 55bpm. So far all I see is a higher res interation of Met Street Racer. No kudos points to Bizarre Creations - Criterion has had them all since Burnout v1.

Little bit negative, don't you think? It's pretty obvious it's an in-game screenshot of an early build, rather than the pre-rendered lies provided by Sony/EA... It's bound to improve, but how much depends on whether M$ want it as a launch title.

Negative? Yes. Unfair? No!

Aside from on-line play, PGRs 1, 2 and now 3 seem to have brought nothing new to the series other than a few more cities and more shiny cars.

Infact, the biggest thing to happen to the series was the crash damage seen in PGR. Oh! What crash damage? Hmm. I could have sworn it was demoed at E3 2001.

Don't worry; my bile isn't poured solely on PGR. GT is guilty of peddling the same old s**t, with more polys, cars and tracks, but at least Polyphony added a truck load more tracks and more cars than is healthy. Hmm. I suppose there was rally racing in GT3. Still no on-line play, though. Knobheads.

Oh, and don't go down the "it's early so it's bound to look a bit crap" Nobody releases shoddy screen shots unless they want their game to tank.

It's a tech demo, like the entirity of Doom 3. If you expect big things you face major disappointment.

Where does PGR stand in racing circles now anyhow? The real racing's with Forza, the fun with Burnout, the destruction with Full Auto... where does that leave this? A sort of Ridge Racer level? Not realistic, not all-on arcade, but a bit-player?

Still, early days. This generation is the one where everyone expects amazing things, and none of it will be delivered. Both processors have been tailored in a way that won't allow for amazing adpative AI, so you can forget that happening. I can't see new genres springing up overnight on them, either. It'll be same ol', same ol', and people will buy as normal.

Don't expect amazing fog and flame effects; if it were going to happen the Killzone video would have been more impressive than the frankly lame effects it showed off as "cutting edge". Until games companies can afford to match the quality of, say, Pixar films, nothing of the sort will happen.

Crap and Shoddy are harsh words - I prefer mediocre. A N Other would look at that shiny body work, and be sufficiently impressed enough to pick up a copy at launch. I agree it's not gobsmackingly superior to what the current xbox can achieve, but then the first genuine next-gen pic's always underwhelm me.

Behold the mighty PS2!

Please! Non-playable doesn't mean movie these days. All the cut scenes done with the in-game engines these days are non-playable, but they aren't movies in the traditional sense.

By the time TGS is out, there will be PS3 dev kits, especially for 1st party devs like Polyphony. I'll bet what's shown will be a scripted sequence using the in-game engine, sort of like the Unreal demo from E3.

And besides, I'd expect MS to be ahead of Sony in what they were showing since by TGS they should be only a week or so away from 360 being released into the shops! Sony, however will be at least 3-4 months away from their "Spring 2006" release of PS3.

maybe not in the traditional sense, but when was the last time you saw a commercial for, for example, final fantasy that showed the actual game, rather than a cutscene, or a summon?

Maybe not movies in a traditional sense, but if a it's something that is shown as an intro to a game, it's not exactly the game, is it?

And this isn't to say that MS doesn't do this, because they do too, but to hype up something that might be the game is...stupid.

I like how this is Spong news.... ynow theres a 3 minute video of playtime with the new Zelda game. But you'd probably be more inclined to post a picture of the new font printed on the Xbox 360's red button.

PGR was unimpressive, kudos are crap, but Link/Online play and Nurburgring make PGR 2 my favorite racing game before Forza came out. But if PGR 3 is the same crap, with the same types of tracks and such (i.e. all city, no/one/few real race tracks) I'll probably play it until they come out with Forza 360 then never think about it again. Dunno maybe its just me, but why do I want to drive a car with a 6-speed that does 200+mph on a track that ensures I'll never need to shift out of 3rd gear? Without Nurburgring and online I would have probably rented PGR 2. Probably.

Aside from online play indeed...a racing game without online/Link play is like an FPS without the same. Incomplete. Sony and Polyphony would still own my soul had either GT on the PS supported Link. I honestly don't understand, I mean, if I were making a racing game, Link/Online play would be close to the top of the list of priorities. I mean wheres the joy in having a garage full of beautiful and exotic cars if you can't use them to make your friends throw their controllers down in disgust?? I mean, comparing lap times just doen't compare... Forza may not have nearly as many cars as GT but online play makes it incomprably better. Now if I could only tune/upgrade cars in Link mode...

I dunno, it just kinda irked me that you dismissed as seemingly irrelevant the MOST IMPORTANT feature a racing game can have...admittedly, it has been done before, but they still get full credit for doing the right thing with online play when everyone else is slacking...

There is a difference between a CGI movie (Star Wars Ep3 the film) and a cutscene using the game engine (Lego Star Wars the game).

One is pre-rendered on SGI workstations or the like, the other is done in real time on the console.

If we are shown in-game cutscenes, these are going to be of the same quality as the in-game gameplay sections, just with scripted moves and camera work.

For example the E3 Killzone 2 footage was pre-rendered, the E3 Unreal footage was scripted in-game graphics running on a dev kit.

I'd hope that by TGS we were being shown playable in-game footage from MS, given the proximity to the 360's release date. Sony, however, would be OK to show scripted in-game only since they would be about 6-7 months away from launch.

Remember E3 this year was about 6 months away from the 360's launch (rumoured to be November) so we should expect a similar level of interaction from Sony at TGS, given their Spring '06 launch window for PS3.

TBH, by that point I would hope and expect in-game footage - a recording on proper game play. It's understandable why one would choose not to have an actual live demo - a system crash, despite it being development code on a dev kit, would be the PR disaster.

We hope. As I said before, the majority of commercials for games like FF show the CGI cutscenes, not "in-game cutscenes." (This is stateside, by the way) I'm not saying that Sony will do this, but I won't get excited over movies any more than I get excited for a screenshot. Sure, as I said, the screen looks nice, but it doesn't show how the game plays.

That's true! I don't believe anything can "show" you how a game plays except a console, a controller, a tv and a copy of the game.

However, if we are talking about showing the quality of the graphics, as long as we know for sure the cutscene is being rendered in real time and not just spooled from a DVD, then we can see the quality of the in-game graphics from a cutscene.

Like I mentioned above, the Unreal demo at E3 was impressive, possibly more so than the Killzone 2 one, because we saw it was real time. It wasn't widely shown in E3 coverage, but after the movie was played, the guy from Epic showed it again only this time he moved the camera and paused the action etc. This was much better at showing the quality of the graphics engine and the horsepower of the hardware it was running on than the KZ2 movie.

Although it has to be said, the PS2 demo movies have been surpassed by in-game graphics these days, so they were a reasonable demo of the power of the PS2 hardware. Maybe we will see graphics of the quality of the KZ2 movie on PS3, but I'm betting it won't be until a couple of years after the launch.

True, but if Sony where to, Microsoft's lawyers would be all over the advertsing body and Sony unless they put screen size letters saying "NOT INGAME FOOTAGE" scrolling across the screen. Ok, maybe not that dramatic, but if they were stupid enough to try it, Microsoft would complain big time.

I dunno which Halo 2 TV ads you saw, Ben, but from where I was looking, they were mostly cut-scenes, if not rendered specially for the ad sequences.

Everybody does it, very few games ads show actual in-game footage from the perspective of the player. Maybe the recent THQ ads in front of Enterprise. I know the Destroy all Humans one is mostly in-game, not sure about the Punisher ones.

Let's face it, compared to the average images on TV, most in-game footage is quite poor. Understandably so, but poor in comparison. For a TV advert to show in-game all the time, with no cut scenes or rendered animations would be quite brave. The DAH adverts are pretty jarring when you see them.

Showing FMV cut-scenes is misleading, but if everyone's doing it, then I suppose it's fair game.

It's sort of similar to the Transformers, Thundercats, Centurions toy adverts of the eighties: I don't know how the dudes controlling them in the adverts managed to get them to fly, shoot, and do handbrake turns so convincingly, but I could never quite manage it.