New Year, New Me(ss of ideas)

Global GT Lights cars racing in Silverstone by butter_lord and Kad'O

It's already halfway past January and things have been positive so far for me, at least for normal things I do. Past 15 days were filled with me following this year's Dakar Rally while being in awe with how the cinematography are put along with the commentator's plethora of dad jokes, puns, remarks witty enough to wipe floors with Lorelai Gilmore, and sneaks that unfortunately doesn't include Taylor Swift references (but thankfully I got that one covered myself). Other things include finishing Combat Mecha Xabungle which I consider it as an "unserious mecha anime with more comedy bias despite having its fair share of serious moments", and an office trip to Jogjakarta of which I haven't visited the place for a long time, but last and not least is rebooting my content creation project after reflecting on my actions in terms of creations, although I have to say I still have a slow start with not that much post interactions along the way.

Even then, my homework is stacked as the time goes, but my discovery of a new method in creation and a more active community actually help alleviating the burden and actually make the final work satisfying. I do have this target where I need to make sure that I can make good creations and cash in some new audiences on social media on the way to keep the top down racing genre alive and interesting, especially with more games on the sub-genre making their returns such as GeneRally 2. That said, this was something that led to the first ever major announcement for the new project: the 2023 Dakar Rally T1 class cars, three of them, with 10 major drivers represented so far.

But Dakar Rally vehicles are just the tip of the iceberg. It actually started with something that doesn't have to do with top down racers, or racing in general, let alone racing games: Taylor Swift's new album, Midnights.

Good Things Always End with "Sport"

A photo posted by Rendy Andrian Y (@tsukasa_kadoya) on May 27, 2016 at 4:31pm PDT

Over the span of two weeks, lots were happened. Gran Turismo Sport, the newest entry to the Gran Turismo franchise, showed its colors with a couple of new stuffs, including the Tokyo Expressway (!), the all-new evolution of Photo Mode called Scapes, and the Livery Editor, as well as the fact that it is now a sanctioned by FIA which means that this game will be equal to any motorsporting event and, taking the e-Sport context into account, would be a good challenger to the DoTA 2 scene.

One week later meanwhile, I managed to try out GRID Autosport in Margo City. Intel Indonesia held an event entitled Intel Game Time which allowed visitors to shop for Intel's products as well as trying out their skills in three different games: GRID Autosport, FIFA Online and Point Blank. This golden opportunity is something that I can't be missed because of the fact that the words "GRID Autosport" and "Margo City" were indeed in the same sentence. It was a unique experience although I didn't expect anything from the leaderboard which would take the Top 3 from the daily leaderboard over the span of the show's run throughout Wednesday to Sunday in a final held in the Sunday afternoon, with the Top 3 in the final get to the Grand Final held in Mall Taman Anggrek.