racing games

There are at least 4 racing games that look incredible on PlayStation 3 coming out near end of this year. It's a car enthusiast's heaven but with so little time, how am I going to play all these games?




The no-brainer: Gran Turismo 5
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merits: best simulation series for a decade




The look-at-me: NFS Hot Pursuit
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Merits: all the new super/hyper cars. Veyron, 918 Spyder, Zonda F




The free-world roamer: Test Drive Unlimited
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Merits: roam the island of Hawaii and drive the best cars in the world




The F1 lover: F1 2010
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Merits: the latest F1 season with all drivers and all tracks

driving Honda CRZ

Car: Honda CR-Z Alpha auto-manual (pedal shift)
Price (in Japan): 2.5 million yen (roughly USD 29k)


from my experience, here are two ways to look at it:

1) from a sports car point of view
It really is disappointing. It feels bulky, despite its best effort to keep the weight down. The steering input and feedback is a major let down. I don't know in that aspect it's better than Honda Fit - a family compact.

2) from a hybrid car point of view
This is way more fun than your run-of-mill Prius or Honda's own Insight. The preset modes are actually useful too. Sport/Normal/Econ. I was on Sport mode 99% of my test drive. The Econ mode is really snail-like, but it gets the job done - saving gas.

The good:
dash, dials, general interior feel very modern, easy to see, although there are way too many buttons to fiddle with
the pedal shift feels pretty textile, can't say I like it but general public probably do

The bad:
no punch behind the push, if the battery is fully charged, in Sport mode, and pedal to the metal, it gets up to speed, but no torque, at all

The ugly:
the sheer size it feels... it feels empty, especially with the so-called auto-manual pedal shift. VERY LITTLE FEEDBACK.

Verdict:
Until I can drive it a little harder for real, for now it lacks what makes a car sporty - information from the road conveyed back to the driver. It fails as a sporty car. It fails as an all-out hybrid in mileage. It's pitched toward the casual driver, somewhat environmentally minded, interested in sporty looking car, with no children (teeny tiny backseats).

what to listen to?

These have strangely been the days I listen to music often. Let's put it this way, "no music no life" has always been the furthest from my truth. I'd rather listen to a good engine scream to be honest. But with the drive I have now (good open top motoring, not so busy country roads) and the extra speakers right around my neck I finally got myself wanting to look for that missing piece of puzzle.

Here is what I've come up with in my journey to a second music discovery.

Indie

Everything that has indie in its names, indie rock, indie alternative, alternative rock, indie pop. I can't listen to anything else. For 3 years, I have tried everything on the horizon, well besides death metals. I find indie music a breath of fresh air, the only thing that goes into my ears through to my entire being without the cynicism.

But soon after my decision to stick with indie music I was hit with a dilemma. As I find out more about a particular band, I start to lose interest in them. I don't want to know who they are. I don't want them to become widely popular (main stream-ish), case in point, The Black Keys.

So the most sane thing to do is I get what I can from Internet indie outlets that bring in the unknowns and the lesser knowns. Still the damage is there. When I'm 50 years old, I'll look back to this decade seeing a blank sheet of music history when I chased the invisible. (I don't pay attention to who they are. The chances of them being played on the radio, now or ever, is a whopping zero.)

I'd rather have that than current pop, hip hop, pop rock, please god no. And I'll have the occasional opera tracks. Thanks.

driving Japan's country roads

I've driven across most of Japan. Most, as in spanning the country length-wise, from as far south as Kyushu and as far north as Hokkaido. I have even been to the northernmost point of Japan where Russia is a stone's throw away (well slightly farther away than that).

In the earlier years I wanted to save money so I never used the expressways. They're expensive. 2500 - 3000 yen (~35 USD) is the typical fare for a 3-hour drive. But as long as time not a real concern, I recommend national roads (国道) in the country side that promise better sights.

The daily commute being too short for my S2000, last Sunday we took it out for a stretch of its legs on a beautiful road - the Kujukuri tolled road (九十九里有料道路) on the east coast of Chiba prefecture. With the sun peeking from behind a few late winter clouds, we had the top down and let the crisp air greet our faces before the pollen-filled hay fever season begins in the last week of Feb.



not my pic

If you look carefully you can see the coastline to the right and the blue body of water to the left is I believe a river.