My boy rpg games free Continue The soupy morning mist is just beginning to rise as an eclectic convoy of car files into the Tsukuba chain near Tokyo. This white fist club track in peanut farming plains is just 25 miles (or two hours bumper to bumper drive) northeast of downtown Tokyo. The amenities are a little tired: deserted garages peeling concrete and empty stands peeling paint lines a 1.3 mile sidewalk, rain soaked that day. However, a vase of freshly cut flowers perfumes the men's room, a sign of Japanese obsession with details. Tsukuba is the home track of Gran Turismo, a relentlessly realistic driving simulation that runs exclusively on Sony PlayStation's home game console. In its current iteration, the fourth, released in late 2004, priced at $49.95 and known as the Gran Turismo 4 (or simply GT4), the player can choose from a fancy garage of more than 700 road cars and racers modeled by rivet wing racks on real cars that are produced by 80 different automakers and teams. The player can also choose from 51 ovals, road courses, street tracks and dirt tracks for riding, including Tsukuba, and the play function allows that player to be a spectator on his own drive from different angles. In the role-playing simulation section, players start out as penniless driving school greenhorns and climb their way up the racing ladder to superstar leagues, earning computer prize money that they can spend on cars and speed parts. A small, young, stress-added army of workaholics who carefully build a game byte byte in a cavernous studio on the second floor of an anonymous office block in Tokyo's southeastern Edagawa district is taking a rare day off. Polyphony Digital, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, which produces Gran Turismo, leased Tsukuba for a sponsoring company. Leading the parade of RX-7, M3s, Evos, and STI salaries are relatively good in this area of work- this 39-year-old game creator, Kazunori Yamauti, in his all-white Ford GT. Slender, buzz-coiffed, and usually dressed in Japanese-fashionable black, Gran Turismo's father enjoys celebrity status in Japan and Europe, especially in the automotive industry and worldwide gaming. He will spend most of the day track Tsukuba humbly, sweating in his driving suit, giving hot paw rides to the GT of his adoring staff. Turismo may be about virtual cars running on digitized tracks in the pixel universe, but it generates buckets of real cash. Since its introduction in Japan in 1996 and in the United States in 1997, Gran Turismo has been a coveted system seller for Sony, a flagship title so popular that many people buy a Sony PlayStation console only to play that one game. So far, more than 48 million copies have been sold worldwide, helping Sony overtake and outpace Nintendo's rival gaming consoles Microsoft is on the market worth about $30 billion in annual sales. Turismo's huge catalog of cars introduced an international audience to the then Japanese domestic product, including the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, Nissan Skyline GT-R and Subaru Impreza WRX STi. The game deserves credit for helping to make these and other vehicles in international iconic cars, and for persuading automakers to bring versions of them to the U.S. market. Yamauti informally consults on style and youth culture with various car companies that once rejected Turismo and denied him licenses, but is now a jockey to have their newest cars featured in the game. Despite the day of play in Tsukuba, the pressure is colossal to finish the fifth redesign of Gran Turismo. Sony needs the GT5 to pump up sales of its newly redesigned box, the PlayStation3. Since its introduction last year, a month before Christmas, the PS3 has been battling against gale-force headwinds created by its steep $500 base price (a more powerful version worth $600), a shortage of available games, and Nintendo's new Wii. This year's $250 Wii is an electronics phenomenon, a smash-selling console that deftly incorporates physical body movements to player-swings, punches, throws, and weapons aiming into action. While PlayStation3 also has some gesture-based controls, kids and their parents flocked to the Wii, which has a more intuitive phone and light family fun games such as bowling and baseball. Nintendo has taken a path that is more appealing to more time-consuming people, said N'Guy Croal, chief technology editor at Newsweek magazine. He says the PlayStation2 was so popular around the world with an astounding 105 million devices sold that Sony didn't want to change its formula. So Sony left the PS2 familiar, but the thumb numbing controller with its dozen buttons and dual joysticks was largely unchanged while Nintendo, which was far trailed by Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox 360 in sales, was less to lose and thus was more inventive in wii design. But launching a killer title like Gran Turismo could swing the pendulum back to Sony's way, says Croal. Gran Turismo was one of the first names to attract adults to home game consoles, which previously tended to be abandoned by children as they got older, says Croal. Games like Turismo are difficult, but there is something about them that gets millions of people to buy them. You can play Turismo for a long time and don't get bored. Polyphony avoided announcing the launch date of Turismo 5, but admits that the development timeline has stretched. So far Polyphony has released one free downloadable teaser game and another is scheduled for the fall, but the best scripts have a full game without appearing spring 2008, more than 15 months after the launch of PlayStation3. Meanwhile, programmers argue with the mighty task of increasing modeling simulations and hyperdetail to meet Yamauti's requirements for authenticity and visual beauty and to meet the expectations of the game's rabid fans. One part of the cement floor of polyphony Digital studio looks like a Pentagon control room, the other - as a hobby store, affected by a typhoon. On the Pentagon side, stone faces programmers massage those and zeros in the sophisticated software that underpins the game. By and large, these are computer nerds with little interest in cars and a taste for decoration, which ends with disembodied motherboards. Typical of the low, cramped, single booths on the art side of the studio is 39-year-old game designer Tadashi Erashima. When the next big temblor hits Tokyo, they'll dig it out of a landslide of car models, car magazines and car books stacked in erratic piles around its two computer screens. In this much more interesting half of the room, game designers digitally sculpt cars and draw tracks and background scenes using photos, drawings, automaker engineering data, and die-cast models as subjects. The powerful Autodesk Maya graphic software makes cars, buildings, waving flags, strolling onlookers, scudding clouds, and moving shadows in three dimensions and offering sky color over 16 million shades. The images match the car's specific exhaust roar and screeching tires and set carefully selected music tracks to the polyphony audio crew. Like some other Turismo programmers, Terashima holds a crib with a sleeping bag under the table so he can just slide down and nod for hours when the eyelids get sluggish in the flair of the clock. Recently, programmers stay at work for a few days at a time to meet the deadline, and the office provides housing. Those who don't keep a private crib can go to a row of sleeping dormitories at the back of the studio-registration board prevents clumsy intrusions and showers in attached bathrooms. Glassed, soundproofed recreation area features electric guitars, well stocked magazine racks, books, movies, food and other distractions for a time when employees should not think about Gran Turismo for a while. In the center of the studio, opposite Yamauty's glass-walled office, it's completely hidden by curtains because, employees say, it's a confused mess inside - it's a two-story-tall, blue-lit, glass-covered tower where Gran Turismo 5 lives in prenatal form. Polyphony's 80-terabyte mainframe (one terabyte equals 1,048,576 megabytes) is considered one of Tokyo's largest gaming studios. Cooled to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, the tower also contains Yamauti wine and champagne stash. No doubt he would pop a few corks when Starts. It was Yamauti's most ambitious attempt yet to implement an accurate driving simulation with the TV-quality images he dreamed of Teenage arcade rat playing Pole Position. His first shot was taken in 1994, when Sony New Media introduced the first PlayStation console. Yamauti then was a developer in the new media who encouraged his bosses to create a genuine driving simulator. Sony was more interested in emulating the huge sales Nintendo generates with its Super Mario Bros., cartoon-like action game. Thus, Yamauti's first project, the Motor Toon Grand Prix, involved manic characters shooting at each other from gravitational, weapon-laden cars. Sales in Japan were brisk enough that Yamauti received permission for a more serious driving game, and Gran Turismo was born. Motor Toon unveiled the first version of what will become one of Sony Computer Entertainment's most valuable assets, gran Turismo engine physics. This is the basic code by which the computer simulates the dynamic behavior of the vehicle, forcing the digital car to respond to the player's inputs as well as the virtual road. To be convincing, the software must be flexible enough so that a gamer parked on the couch running a portable controller can feel the difference between a BMW M5 and a Toyota Corolla.