I found very little to interest me at TGS this year. Much the same as last year, in fact, where I was only interested with some of the stuff because I was there and it afforded me the opportunity to get an early play on the Xbox 360. Even so, one piece of oddness that inspired many an online debate was the price of Gran Turismo HD.

What was odd was that it didn’t herald the expected high cost of Blu-ray games, but that it takes the concept of microtransactions and runs with it. And runs, and runs. It’s still going, I think.

That’s just wrong. How can you possibly sell a car game without cars? Will you have to buy ammo in Resistance when you run out now? It’s accepted now that the horse armour in Oblivion was really stupid but it wasn’t one of the fundamentals of the game; it’s not like you had to buy a sword. Or feet so that you could actually move around and play the thing.

Microtransations are fine as a side thing so that you can get a few extra maps or something for your favourite game when your interest is beginning to wane, but when content is excluded deliberately so that you have to pay extra for it, it becomes a bad thing. £50 games are annoying but I’d prefer to pay that and have the full, undiluted game there than I would pay £20 and have to spend 50p a time for everything I want to use.

I had as much fun online in PGR3 with some friends playing around in some of the weirder cars as I did using Ferraris, and that’s unlikely to happen if it requires a monetary risk on what could be a crap car that you’ll use for ten minutes before going back to the F50 GT.

In short: bad, bad idea. Don’t support it and let it be consigned to the scrapheap where it belongs.