Idealty's Domain: Let's Talk Tech

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue Platform: PS3 Develepor: Polyphony Digital Release Data: 4/15/08 Price: $39.99 Screens: The next installment of the critically acclaimed Gran Turismo series, which has sold nearly 50 million units to date, is on its way to the PS3 next month. However, there is a catch. The prologue in the title indicates that this is not the final and complete version of GT5. In fact, it's more of a progress report as Polyphony is breaking down the release of GT5 into increments to tide fans over since the scope and development time for the full game would have too long of a wait. Indeed, the existence of this game is smart marketing by Sony to milk one of its biggest franchise on its still young PS3 which has been starved for big games. The first installment came out in December 06 titled Gran Turismo HD concept which was a free demo featuring a single new location to race about 20 cars around with new HD graphics. It looked great and was a great free tease of what GT5

Never have I seen a gaming system be as widely criticized and hated on as the PS3 between it unveiling back in May 2005 and the end of 2007, a year after it's November 2006 release. Hardcore gamers and gaming press would bad mouth it as if they were paid too, consistently pointing to lack of features compared to the competition, high price, and "No games" as reasons to not buy the system. The criticism went much farther than simply recommending its competitors as the PS3 literally was the laughing stock of the industry and Sony simply could do no right. Many times I've heard of casual people walking into a game store and asking "What about the PS3?" and the clerk responding with a chuckle saying "Nobody's buying it! It's too expensive and has no games. Xbox360 is much better". The impression most had was that the PS3 had a horrible 1st year, with a launch that resulted in its limited hardware not even selling out weeks after release, limite

PC gaming has traditionally been a difficult and expensive hobby due to constantly evolving hardware and high cost components (particularly graphic cards). However, the last year or so has seen a nice selection of graphic cards released by both Nvidia and ATI that are not only great performing cards, but present an unprecedented value to the costumer with very low prices. Nvidia GeForce 8800GT Released: October 2007 Price: ~$250 (512MB) Specifications: 8800GT Details Upon its release, the 8800GT literally changed the PC graphics market overnight. Delivering performance virtually equal to the 8800GTX (Nvidia's second card from the top) but for half the price, you could not find these cards online or at stores for months after its release. Despite its numbering as an 8000 series, this is actually the first card to use Nvidia's G90 cores (all of the other 8000 cards use the G80 core) which features several improvement such as 65nm manufacturing resulting in less heat output and po