Cars, cars, cars

Look at the picture. This is the place where I stayed for my Easter holydays, a very small village, whose population during the winter is just twenty people. But during weekends and in the summer, everyone comes here, from relatives to people that just got in love with the place and ended having a house here. So we go from 20 to 300 people!

Still, the place is perfect for relaxing, even now that we have free wireless Internet connection, thanks to the Internet Rural program.

In my case, I could read two or three books and still managed to have some social life!

BTW, it's been like ten days since I played GT4, how hard is to be a fan boy!

No one will notice

Today, while I was about to write a short review of Street Racing Syndicate for a magazine, I was having the traditional brainstorming with myself, trying to make the best use of the 1.300 characters I had available for the game. And then, as if my fingers and my brain weren't mine, I started writing this:

It is possible that the historians of the future will analyze in detail the popular culture of our time, and they will wonder why car culture was so fashionable at the beginnings of the SXXI. Specially bearing in mind that the proliferation of the private vehicle isn't precisely sustainable, as we have too much contaminating emissions, we will make short of fuel and we lack all the roads we'll need if we were to buy all the cars they want us to buy. But this is not important to motoring aficionados, that see as the interactive offer is always growing in the genre of "races, tuning and hot chicks in shorts".

Best thing about it? No one will notice!

GT4 time goes down as oil goes up

This doesn’t come as a surprise at all, as soon as GT4 fell in my hands, oil prices started to go up, making me as busy as ever. Add to that the unstoppable stream of friends that come to visit, and you’ll end up with a gamer that has “too much life”. And that’s good, because a life of friends is something that really has future... and videogames, well, my friend Pedro says that if you were to power your TV and PS2 manually, you’ll have to work two hours to get a hour of play... how about a cycling simulator, then? It's called a bycicle!

***

Eurogamer publishes an interview with the man. This Yamauchi is as slippery as a snake! He must have been drunk when he spoke about making a GT game for children, as that was the only time I’ve heard him saying something meaningful and not being evasive and inconsistent: “Games must not rely on hardware specifications, but on the creativity of the developers.” Yes, of course, indeed, then stop moaning about how we’ll have to wait to get car damage until the PS3 comes.

That's so nice of you, Sony...

It arrived yesterday, better late than never, goes the saying... Well, after all it wasn't just my copy of GT4 (I bought it already, remember?), but the amazingly exclusive Gran Turismo 4 limited edition! The game is presented in a big white box, and it includes the game, a press disc with lots of pics from the game, a comparison between the game and reality, logos, movies, press releases, etc. It also comes with a desktop calendar, a GT4 passport, where you can put two pictures (printed in Photo Mode by an Epson printer), and a luxurious 176 page book. The book comes with a lot of pictures I already have seen before and some interesting comments from Kazunori itself. The rest seems written in the style of airline magazines, but as we say around here, "lo que cuenta es la intención".

Nurburgring chase

Progress in GT4 is slow at the moment. Reasons? Plenty of guests lately... and Nurburgring...

This circuit is so freaking funny to drive (and challenging if you want it fast) that they could have released a game with just this circuit and some cars and still it would have rocked.

I did one of the license tests, that consists in driving a lap in the Ring behind the pace car. The car you use in this test is a souped up black Mercedes, powerful and sticky. You can’t pass the pace car or run into it, easier said than done...

***

This week I am going to Manresa to give a speech about the energy crisis. Thinking about including a Photomode spoof...

Banzai!

Those faces are from Japanese representatives of car manufacturers like Toyota, Volkswagen, Daihatsu, Mercedes, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, Ford, and Suzuki. As you can see in their attitudes, they're ready, they “want to fight” each other to the top of the food chain of the automotive industry. No, it’s not a weird Japanese reality show where car salesmen fight each other for a sale, it's that they just took part in a competition in GT4 (warning, Japanese link). The winner? The Toyota representative, with a Toyota 88C-V. The auto industry should show their love for videogames more often!, as Kazunori knows very well, you must start to love cars when you're a child (I know, because I started loving cars and motorbikes when I was a child). Then, as an adult, is absolutely natural to enter the farce about cars giving you "status", cars meaning more than just transport, cars as a way of express yourself, and all that shit.

Fun in the GDC

Although I don't follow theory of games development so close as I did in the past, some snippets from this year Game Developers Conference opening keynote are in order. And that's Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun for Games" (thanks to Wonderland for highlighting the bests parts):

When we meet noise, and fail to make a pattern out of it, we get frustrated and quit.
Once we see a pattern, we delight in tracing it, and in seeing it reoccur.
Fun is the feedback the brain gives while successfully absorbing a pattern.
Games are the cartoon version of real world sophisticated problems.

Now I realise that I met Koster in 2003, interviewed him for TV during E3 (I am so bad for names!). He's an RPG specialist and the game designer behind Star Wars Galaxies, and speaks a brilliant Spanish!

* * *

I’ve been doing some tests with Premiere Pro and my video capture setup. The verdict: (what a surprise!) PC systems suck for video capturing and editing. At the end, it worked, but with my little Titanium G4 everything works on the first try. I’ll see, what I’ll end doing...

The Appointment in Samarra

Yesterday, while in the train to Barcelona, I was rereading Jorge Riechman's "Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte" (people that don't want to travel to Mars), a fantastic book on the subject of ecology, ethics and selflimitation. I love the way the book is edited, with many subtitles and quotes mixed with the main text. In one of those, Riechman talks about an old parable whose motto could be "you can run, but you can't hide". I've found that William S. Maughan re-told the parable in "The Appointment in Samarra":

(The speaker is Death)
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

It's a powerful metaphor to describe our actual situation: we are desperately looking for our horse to arrive to Samarra (salvation through technology), without knowing that perhaps the "solution" it would just increase our problems in the future. What is waiting for us in Samarra could be something we didn't expect.

¡Imperdonable!

Just to let you know how insignificant I am, yesterday Kazunori Yamauchi, the man behind the Grand Turismo series was in Madrid, presenting GT4's arrival to Europe. And I wasn't there. Of course, I was "invitadísimo", but a plane ticket wasn't included in the invitation. Well, I don't mind not going to those parties, but that was a missed opportunity to meet Kazunori again and tell him about peak oil! After all, he's the man who said this:

I'd like young kids to understand more fully the fun of cars. Using the entertainment power of games, we'll be, in a sense, increasing the number of car lovers twenty years or so down the road. If we don't grow to love cars in youth, we become adults who are uninterested in cars."

Not that I don't love his work, etc, but in the light of the energy challenges we'll have to meet in the coming decades, his project, putting it lightly, appears a bit naive.

BTW, there's this US government-sponsored report, "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management" (PDF file, 1,2 MB), that should help you to understand why this weblog is called Yamauchi's Paradox. For an overview of the report, my friend Adam has just published an article about that: US report acknowledges peak-oil threat.

GT-Logía, WTF?

As I am a person with a life, and a very busy one, I didn't play tonight. And this morning I am going to Barcelona, to see my parents and to pick up shipments (my GT4 press copy? I doubt it, that would be too fast for them, probably there is some stuff from Logitech). I am very happy with Photomode, I got some very nice pics very early! Won the beginner's cup in A-Spec. I don't feel like trying B-Spec yet...

In the meantime, I discovered (via Meristation) GT-Logía, the newest online PR stunt from the Sony crowd, a viral nonsense: put your birth date and you'll get your "car-horoscope":

You have a striking personality, caracteristic of people with advanced ideas. A car like the DMC DeLorean is perfect to identify with it. It is a model with a retro touch, but at the same time it has a futuristic tendency in its lines that has allowed it to survive to the test of time with elegance and the same atractiveness. People like you have this duality between past and future for some aspects of live.

Freaking scary! I said "duality" in one of my firts posts! I-Chi rules!

Mmm...

The final turn at the final lap of the final race of my first championship in GT Mode. The amazingly green 323F, my first car.

Everything is ready for a GT4 afternoon

Ingredients: GT4 PAL, a telly, a Playstation 2.

Optional: a sourround system (aka Home Cinema), a Driving Force Pro, a proper racing seat.

Don't play with this kids!: some THC (for the replays and B-Spec), a tormented mind, a cup of tea.

Put disc on PS2, sit, relax, race, watch replay, sip tea, puff. Repeat.

OMG! I forgot that my memory card is filled up!!!!! Grrrr, but don't worry, because Pep (man, I owe you now more than 100€) is going to bring me one of these non Sony 16MB memory cards!

It's almost here

Ok, so I' ve just done a little of tele-buying, and thanks to my friend Pep who lives in Barcelona, in a few hours GT4 will be mine! I am sorry "tu palabra contra la mía", but I won't be buying the game at your store (nothing personal, but you know how nit- picky are people that come from the big city when they go to stores in towns: we find them slow and dumb, it's a miracle they got to sell something!).

Photomode as cultural sabotage

I am still unable to produce my own Photomode shots, but I've been playing a bit with one of the pictures you can find at GT Planet's forums. It's one of these American muscle cars, a gas guzzler, and I thought that was a good metaphor for the "landing" of the American Monster. Because "what goes up must come down", "all good things must come to an end", etc, pure peak philosophy, the philosophy of the future!

Hello world!

GT4 is not yet here, so I guess am in Europe (the other possibility is Australia). I've called two times to my friend "mi palabra contra la tuya", to no avail. "Tomorrow afternoon", he said the last time. Spoke to a friend today (Skype) that is aware of my duality, I explained to him that I was planning to do some spoof ads for the Peak Oil thing, using the nifty Photo Mode feature. The cornucopian that every gamer has inside is showing up in the GT Planet forums through this interesting (informal) contest: Photomode ads.

Oil is 51,30 $ a barrel (WTI) /51,32 (Brent) and all I can think is how can I get my dirty hands over the fucking GT4 ASAP...