- 10
- Los Angeles
- nuxetcrux
I was once a late stage alcoholic, living on the streets. I had my license taken away a long time ago for racing and got jail for continuing anyway, and honestly I should've been off the streets sooner. I spent years on skid row in LA, in and out of jails.
Prior to that, my first book I wrote for 1st grade was just the specs I copied from the back of the Car and Driver with drawings of the cars, including a Vector M12. I got GT1 on launch as boy and, if you caught me gazing at an upscaled replay, you'd see the face of wonder, those pixels--those cars--dancing in my eyes.
Now it is 2023. I've been out of jail and off the booze for almost a decade. I reconnected with gaming in a sober living using an old phone and a DS2. I became a chef in Michelin starred restaurants, built a bit of a life. Got in on the gamestop squeeze and got myself a 120fps TV, a PS5, and GT7.
Never have I wasted my time so profoundly as I have on this. I had a thought the other day when I was clearing the last ******** events, buying the last ******** VGT cars that the best form of encryption would perhaps be a cipher that always misleads you into thinking you're on the way to the truth, but those paths just branch ad infinitum, creating new, infinitely almost satisfied breakthroughs, and that the user would participate in the obfuscation. I honestly wish I just relapsed over covid instead of this.
This probably seems like an overreaction, but I feel I'm only able to see the writing on the wall because I've been attending the church of Kaz and Akihiko Tan for 25 years. Their achievements are deserved and staggering. But I'm afraid something here is....decoupling in a concerning way. Aside from the launch, which was the most disrespected I've ever felt by a game company, the game itself is a marvel. And, credit where it's due, they did eventually create something resembling a respectable product. But for the first year, even if you had the pace and drove the wet line--definitely NOT racing--you would still be pitted and randomly slammed, especially on tracks where the pathfinding was far worse even then Motor Toon GP. The pit lane bug, where a car would unrealistically pull 12gs and teleport to the pit entrance and if you were between the two you were banished, wasn't patched for months, among others. And to be sure, while Akihiko Tan was banging out Motor Toon GP in the mid-90s, Papyrus had three-band tire sim in NASCAR Racing ps1. Now, GT is received as a gentle-sim a la Codies' games with a lion's share of labor being poured into modelling and presentation but absolutely NOT into gameplay/realism, since it seems they feel they have achieved perfection. Almost nothing in GT7 is a straightforward input/output with it's physics engine. Because of them shoehorning in other motorsports and car classes, unless the car is operating in its wheelhouse of tarmac tires and the "tuning" engine (read: normalization/constraint engine) three others developed for the user to place the car in a spectrum of performance it can brute force emulate astonishingly well but fails when the seams are allowed to be iterated (i.e. parameters outside of the constraint). Tan himself has often said it was the 'feel' of understeer in early sims that captured his imagination as a youngster working on his own early work, citing Hard Drivin' among a few others, and I would point to the console versions of Nigel Mansell's and Super Monaco GP on genesis as also having a very strong representation of understeer in the 16-bit era.
Take every version of Mustang that can be normalized through tuning and normalize them. Then put them on a track. It's not just that they all behave and perform differently, but WILDLY different. Like, the deltas for every category of performance are completely blown out. And I understand they are making a consumer product, and that many are currently happy--I don't mean to discourage. But I would be shocked if they didn't **** the franchise straight into the ground with GT8, given the widening cracks and the advanced age and dying passion of Polyphony's leadership, and the fact they behaved like Greed incarnate for a year and play dumb about it. The tires are like keys to different, non-working sims. And a Gran Turismo car has never been able to jump or navigate elevation without videogamey rotational slippage and center of mass cartwheeling.
We've accepted these airborne miscues and no damage and, for a while, anemic engine sounds and loud tires, etc over the years because we love the games and when you love something you learn to love even its faults. Somehow, this is the first in the series, for me (I missed 3,4,5,6) where it feels like the opposite is true, that the game is very cold and hard to love and WONT make me a better driver but harm my times in AC and IRL.
It would only take ONE HIRE to fix this, though I would suggest a few more: please bring in new blood and then please reward their passion for actual driving. Then it might be the "Real Driving Simulator".
Prior to that, my first book I wrote for 1st grade was just the specs I copied from the back of the Car and Driver with drawings of the cars, including a Vector M12. I got GT1 on launch as boy and, if you caught me gazing at an upscaled replay, you'd see the face of wonder, those pixels--those cars--dancing in my eyes.
Now it is 2023. I've been out of jail and off the booze for almost a decade. I reconnected with gaming in a sober living using an old phone and a DS2. I became a chef in Michelin starred restaurants, built a bit of a life. Got in on the gamestop squeeze and got myself a 120fps TV, a PS5, and GT7.
Never have I wasted my time so profoundly as I have on this. I had a thought the other day when I was clearing the last ******** events, buying the last ******** VGT cars that the best form of encryption would perhaps be a cipher that always misleads you into thinking you're on the way to the truth, but those paths just branch ad infinitum, creating new, infinitely almost satisfied breakthroughs, and that the user would participate in the obfuscation. I honestly wish I just relapsed over covid instead of this.
This probably seems like an overreaction, but I feel I'm only able to see the writing on the wall because I've been attending the church of Kaz and Akihiko Tan for 25 years. Their achievements are deserved and staggering. But I'm afraid something here is....decoupling in a concerning way. Aside from the launch, which was the most disrespected I've ever felt by a game company, the game itself is a marvel. And, credit where it's due, they did eventually create something resembling a respectable product. But for the first year, even if you had the pace and drove the wet line--definitely NOT racing--you would still be pitted and randomly slammed, especially on tracks where the pathfinding was far worse even then Motor Toon GP. The pit lane bug, where a car would unrealistically pull 12gs and teleport to the pit entrance and if you were between the two you were banished, wasn't patched for months, among others. And to be sure, while Akihiko Tan was banging out Motor Toon GP in the mid-90s, Papyrus had three-band tire sim in NASCAR Racing ps1. Now, GT is received as a gentle-sim a la Codies' games with a lion's share of labor being poured into modelling and presentation but absolutely NOT into gameplay/realism, since it seems they feel they have achieved perfection. Almost nothing in GT7 is a straightforward input/output with it's physics engine. Because of them shoehorning in other motorsports and car classes, unless the car is operating in its wheelhouse of tarmac tires and the "tuning" engine (read: normalization/constraint engine) three others developed for the user to place the car in a spectrum of performance it can brute force emulate astonishingly well but fails when the seams are allowed to be iterated (i.e. parameters outside of the constraint). Tan himself has often said it was the 'feel' of understeer in early sims that captured his imagination as a youngster working on his own early work, citing Hard Drivin' among a few others, and I would point to the console versions of Nigel Mansell's and Super Monaco GP on genesis as also having a very strong representation of understeer in the 16-bit era.
Take every version of Mustang that can be normalized through tuning and normalize them. Then put them on a track. It's not just that they all behave and perform differently, but WILDLY different. Like, the deltas for every category of performance are completely blown out. And I understand they are making a consumer product, and that many are currently happy--I don't mean to discourage. But I would be shocked if they didn't **** the franchise straight into the ground with GT8, given the widening cracks and the advanced age and dying passion of Polyphony's leadership, and the fact they behaved like Greed incarnate for a year and play dumb about it. The tires are like keys to different, non-working sims. And a Gran Turismo car has never been able to jump or navigate elevation without videogamey rotational slippage and center of mass cartwheeling.
We've accepted these airborne miscues and no damage and, for a while, anemic engine sounds and loud tires, etc over the years because we love the games and when you love something you learn to love even its faults. Somehow, this is the first in the series, for me (I missed 3,4,5,6) where it feels like the opposite is true, that the game is very cold and hard to love and WONT make me a better driver but harm my times in AC and IRL.
It would only take ONE HIRE to fix this, though I would suggest a few more: please bring in new blood and then please reward their passion for actual driving. Then it might be the "Real Driving Simulator".
