Gran Turismo 5, oh Gran Turismo 5, how you constantly play with my heart. You toy with me with your release date. You titillate with your Signature Edition. And you punish me with Twitter, via Kazunori Yamauchi tweets letting me know you still are not completed. And now Kazunori Yamauchi tweets providing there will be at least two hard drive install options; 256 megabytes of space needed or, for a smooth play experience, the Yamauchi recommended 10 gigabytes. Of course, Yamauchi does not expand on his "smooth" play experience mention, of course not... Dang you GT5, DANG YOU!

While mandatory disc installs can be pretty annoying, especially when you are racing home play your long lusted after copy of GT5, they have also become a little more common place. But there is still a huge difference between 256 megabytes and 10 gigabytes, like the difference between being able to play your game that day, or needing to wait overnight while your PS3... slowly... installs... the... 10... gigs. And seriously, while I know users can install newer and larger hard drives into their PS3 relatively easily and cheaply (cough, Microsoft, cough), I would still hate to be a racing fan sitting at home with my launch 20gig PS3. I imagine things are tight on the 40gig systems too, as it is not like people are sitting around with nothing on their hard drives, just waiting (and I do mean waiting) for GT5.

So while 256 megabytes is something most can handle and something that should not take that long to install before you get to the racing, how "un-smooth" will your gameplay experience be? I kind of remember another PlayStation 3 racing game having some dreadfully slow load times when it launched.

So is the difference between the two installs the difference between getting into races in a few seconds versus a couple of minutes? If so, I do not think anyone serious about playing a lot of Gran Turismo 5 could stand the extended load times. But there is the problem, at this point we do not know what the difference is. I guess we will have to wait on Yamauchi to drop some more news via Twitter. But hey, if there is one thing GT5 fans are good at by now, it is waiting...

Gran Turismo 5 hits the PlayStation 3 exclusively on November 2, 2010, or at some other unidentified point the future.