
We don't know if the marketing folks at Polyphony Digital are messing with us or if building one of the most impressive racing simulators of all time is just really, really hard. For some reason, the rumored release date of the hotly anticipated Gran Turismo 5 is jumping around like the rear axle of a gen one Cadillac CTS-V. We've heard December 29, 2009, late 2009 and even a March 2010 Japan release. Now comes word on the Amazon website that GT5 is going to be released on March 31, 2010. Frankly, we liked "late 2009" a lot more, but it appears we have little say in the matter.
Who knows, the constant date-shifting could be a heartless attempt by Kazunori Yamauchi and his minions to keep their perpetually forthcoming release in the news. We're thinking it's time to stop with the tomfoolery and get this thing launched. Five years and an all-new gaming console is long enough to wait for the answer to GT4.

Time Fcuk might have been better named if the word "time" in its title was swapped for the word "mind". In the game you play the part of a cute little robot-like creature, who is contacted by yourself from 20 minutes in the future. You are told to get into a box, and from there you enter a world of strange puzzle rooms, where there is always a secondary dimension to the room. You can toggle between dimensions, and doing so can change the structure of the room, as well as the objects within it that you can interact with.While you're busy trying to figure out how to exit each room, "future you" continues to talk to you, and it's creepy. The voice is a little disturbing, but it's what "future you" says that makes things seem weird. He becomes distrustful of you, and talks of being stuck in a room with hundreds of bodies. Like I said, creepy.The puzzles are challenging and fun to think through, and the game has virtually limitless replay value because it has a level creation mode where anyone can create and submit levels. The game can then generate a virtually limitless number of iterations based on user-submitted levels, which are ranked in order of difficulty. Very clever.Time Fcuk may well eat up a bunch of your time, and if you're not careful it might just leave you fcuked.

DiRT 2 had a coming out party in the UK and not only did Ken Block join the festivities, he decided to surprise some big-talking gamers with a couple of hot laps. If we could take anything from the demonstration, it's that Ken Block looks to be just as badass when driving on the other side of the car. Oh, and there's also the comedy – check out the guy who screams in silence and the other one who looks like he's practicing lamaze breathing.

Semantic Wars is a castle defending game with a little bit of hangman thrown in. The idea of the game is that you are building various types of combatants to advance across the screen from your castle to the enemy castle, fighting any opposing warriors they encounter. The goal is to protect your castle while advancing far enough to attack the opposing castle. Creating combatants costs you points, and aside from getting lucky and acquiring some through a bonus box that is dropped by the blimp overhead (really), the only way to increase your points is by guessing letters in secret words, hangman-style. You earn 8 points for each correct letter you guess, but you lose 3 points each time you guess a letter that is not in the word. Though the fighting element of the game isn't particularly well done, the combination of that aspect of the game with the word game is enough to really get your head spinning. It can be challenging to shift gears from guessing letters in words and ensuring that you are creating enough troops to defend your castle, but if you space out for even a little bit, you will get overrun. Semantic Wars is a fun little time waster that should get your brain juices going.

One of the most-anticipated features HTML5 promises for the web is the canvas tag, which allows for dynamic rendering of 2D images. If you can use HTML to draw a 2D image, can native 3D graphics be far behind?
The WebGL project is making that a reality by combining the canvas element, a bit of JavaScript, and the OpenGL 3D drawing engine. OpenGL has been around for years, and you might know it because of its use in many popular desktop video games - if this project is a success, you could be playing 3D games in your browser.
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Hypothetically, let's say you're bored with all the realistic gameplay and endless tuning options of current racing games. What you really want is a rallying game that looks like it was released alongside Pole Position, or Frogger, with cars that look something like colored insects, and -- best of all -- that you can only play from an overhead view. In that case, friends, Rush Rush Rally Racing for the 10-year-old Sega Dreamcast is for you.
The developers themselves tout the facts that RRRR has no sponsored cars nor realistic backgrounds. What is does have is features like single-player grand prix mode with four difficulty levels, three multiplayer modes to enjoy with up to four players, five race cars to choose from, 10 Grand Prix race tracks and 9 additional multiplayer race track. Oh, and an "awesome soundtrack by Black Device." So there. It's also just $22, available at Amazon and eBay next month. Follow the jump to watch the game trailer.

Need for Speed: Shift has added a Car Battle mode that pits some of the fastest, fittest, downright nastiest machinery out there in head-to-head matchups. Fifteen different matchups are possible with cars like the Ford GT going against the Dodge Viper, Cayman and M3 sports car racers battling it out, and Murcielago and DBRS GT-class cars going for honors. The point is to pit unmodified cars against one another to find out which car -- and which driver -- is the business. The game is due out next week. You can check out the video after the jump to start figuring out which cars you want to go showdown with...
Stereogram Tetris needs a disclaimer: not everyone's going to be able to play this game, and those who can might get a headache from it. Remember those magic eye posters, where a secret image was revealed if you could unfocus your eyes the right way? This is Tetris inside one of those. If you can see the hidden 3D images, you can't even see where your pieces are.
I'm not sure it's healthy to stare at a stereogram for the length of time it takes to play a game of Tetris, but the game is definitely cool as a proof of concept. In case trying to play Tetris inside a magic eye isn't already hard enough for you, Stereogram Tetris has three skill levels. I haven't even come close to getting the 100 points it takes for a high score - I can see the stereogram, but not long enough to play a good game - but maybe some of you can do better.

Monopoly is a beloved board game classic that's sold plenty of copies thanks to licensed city-specific editions of its game board, and there are also various electronic and online versions of the game, but none of that compares to Monopoly City Streets. For City Streets, Parker Brothers has used Google maps to create a live, global game of Monopoly with real cities as the game board. Yes, that means that you can own (almost) any street in the world.
The building possibilities are also beefed up, with castles and skyscrapers. Chance cards have changed a bit, too: now they're used to build hazards on your competitors' property. To counteract hazards, you have to get a bulldozer card. With all of this building and demolishing, Monopoly City Streets sounds more like a hybrid of Monopoly and Sim City than a straight-up Monopoly game. Maybe, as the game's website claims, this will be epic fun. If nothing else, this is one time Google can be glad to hear its name in the same sentence as "monopoly."

Tetris-style games that involve arranging falling blocks have seen a lot of variations. Game-makers have tried adding odd pieces, weirdly-shaped game boards and bombs, just to name a few. In Equanimity, the twist is physics-based: the board is a balance beam, and you lose a life for every piece that falls off. The pieces don't interlock, though, like in Tetris. They're various geometric shapes, and you can clear them by matching three of the same color.
The challenge of Equanimity is that the tilting platform, combined with the shapes of some pieces, means that things don't always end up where you intended them to. It's not as fast-paced or challenging as Tetris, so perhaps the zen aesthetic of the game is appropriate. It's a way more relaxing way to kill time than watching your Tetris board fill up while you wait for that elusive long piece.
