Sony's Christmas present to PS3 owners: GTHD!

I've spent several Christmas holidays tracking down Japanese imports of the latest Gran Turismo games for the various PlayStation platforms. This year, I didn't have to hunt.

Sony got all nice and gave us PS3 owners something free to do this weekend: Grand Turismo HD. Well, at least a very playable demo of it.

It's just one track (Eiger Nordwand) that you can race forwards then unlock it backwards. There's 10 unloackable cars and 10 tuned versions of the same cars. PLUS, two racing modes: time trial and the unloackable drift mode. You'll unlock everything in about 30 minutes, but your rewards are worth it.

Even better, the demo has the first ever Ferrarri in a GT game (the 2006 599) and your times are uploaded to online ranking boards. Very nice.

The whole thing runs in glorious 60fps 1080p mode. GOOD LORD does it look great. I was expecting a slightly better looking GT4, but this game is astonishing. And for the first time, the replays don't look as good as the actual game. Developers Polyphony run the replays back in a film-y framerate that give them a cool realistic depth, but it still doen't compare to the actual gameplay.

Keep an eye out for the cool menu animations. The camera drifts into real-time the landscape around the race track and it's cool to see how much detail has gone into the backgrounds. Everything looks jawdropping.

I can't wait for the final version of the game. We will probably have to wait until next holiday season. I also have to keep reminding myself that this isn't GT5, it's just an updated version of GT4. The good news is that it looks totally next generation and way more than a transfer from one system to another.

FYI, as of 7:00 PM (CST) on December 23, the Sony Store servers weren't allowing connections. This was confirmed by several sources. Later that evening the servers were up, but downloading the GTHD demo was taking nearly 6 hours.