With all of the hype being pumped into the Need For Speed franchise by video game developers Electronic Arts, it would seem that the highly anticipated release of the latest Real Driving Simulator is falling by the wayside. That won't be the case if the marketing department at Gran Turismo 5's creators Polyphony Digital has anything to say about it. These screenshots of the game's menu screen show off the designers ability to blend intricately designed sports cars with highly detailed backgrounds and ever evolving humans.

The vehicle on display is a GT500 Nissan GT-R from Japan's Super GT racing series. If this were an SAT question we could ask "V8 Super cars is to Austrialia->ke2092 as Super GT is to (blank)", and you ought to know that the four door race cars from down under are bigger than NASCAR is here in the U.S. In what looks like over a billion polygons of GT-R->ke1592 you can see the extensive detail that the game's designers went to as evident by the countless louvers and intricate head lamps. The surroundings look to be a plaza somewhere in western Europe because of all the German tourists and the Foto hut, but the best part about the people is that they have gained an extra dimension, just another display of the extent that the team at Polyphony go to.

From what we can tell from the images, Gran Turismo 5 will offer the classic Arcade mode, online gameplay, something that looks like the best birthday present ever, the tedious driver tests, some sort of a manage everything garage, a multimedia center, and the usual tools for adjusting the game settings and a place to save your progress. From previous experience we aren't going to bother predicting when GT5 will be available, but one thing is for certain, no matter how many delays each new version of Gran Turismo endures, they are always well worth the wait.

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