Gran Turismo HD Concept Eurogamer impressions

Gran Turismo HD Concept. The shatterer of dreams. The supposed grand let-down of all drift-racing PS3 fans. The marvelous game that was to be, stripped down to a mere tech demo.

There's a lot of negative things one could say about the game. But is it really all that bad? Not at all, according to Eurogamer. In fact, if anything, it seems GT HD Concept signals a new direction for the series. Here's a little excerpt from their first impressions of the game:

I'm not giving Polyphony any special praise for working out that it's fun when cars skid round corners. We've known this for some time. But the implementation here is such that anybody willing to sit and watch 625MB of free demo crawl onto their hard disk will enjoy themselves at the end of it. The idea is simple: instead of trying to go round the track quickly, you have to try and "drift" as effectively as possible through corners, with each one measuring your ability by handing out up to a few-thousand points. Leave the track completely though and your corner's worth of points evaporate. When you're done, the game banks the score and uploads the ranking to the Internet.

In my opinion, I think the most important thing about this game is that it could very well be the start of a new trend in experimentation during game development. HD Concept is a fine way for the developers to test the waters before they start working on their next big game. What with the presence of XNA, Xbox Live Arcade and the upcoming downloadable Wii games channel, one can only hope that more developers will take this approach to seeing what makes gamers happy and what doesn't. Score for the PlayStation 3.