It has taken quite a lot of time for me to find something to write about again, although I did have some ideas in the meantime, but they never really came to fruition, so to speak. They sounded good in my head, but it was a whole different story trying to put the idea down and write something about it. Even though we’re in a difficult, and very weird times at the moment, a lot has been going on throughout the year despite that. My plans for this year have been quite different from what actually happened, but we all know how our lives changed at the beginning of spring earlier this year.
During all these months of restrictions, some time very strict, and other times being a bit more loose, I found myself not really having a lot of motivation for anything. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would agree with me on that one. Maybe in the beginning it was good, in a way, to slow down, spend more time at home, and “look after others” (even though I have some strong opinions about that, but that’s not the point now), but after going through that uncertainty for so long, it does start to become a bit overwhelming and, even more so, frustrating. The only good part of the year, apart from the first two months, that were still normal, were the summer months. Most of the countries loosened their restrictions, we were able to travel to a number of countries without any bigger issues, and life seemed a bit more like it was before. Unfortunately, my job kept me busy quite a lot, so I wasn’t even thinking of taking any time off for a vacation, especially with other (big) plans coming up. I did get to play some volleyball to take my mind off of things, and sports are one of the things I miss the most currently, not being able to play any indoor sports while we’re in a lockdown again, and it was a bit more stress-free part of the year.
While the “lockdown 1.0” (from March to May) was happening I had a bit more time to spend at home, so with nothing else going on, I found myself going through the PlayStation Store, looking for new games to add to my collection. Now, it’s not like I didn’t have any games to play beforehand, but it’s always fun to get a new game and start playing it. As most of you will know by now, I’m a big sports fan, so of course the games I was looking for were in that genre, and I came across some racing games as well. I’ve bought a few of those at the time, but there had been one game that really pulled me in the most let’s say. Even though the game itself is 3 years old, lots of people are still playing it constantly, including myself for the last 7 or 8 months.
The game in question is Gran Turismo Sport. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the Gran Turismo family, it’s a series of sim-racing games, mostly for PlayStation consoles, with the first game being released at the end of 1997. In these 23 years, they have released 12 different games, with Gran Turismo Sport being the latest, even though it’s already over 3 years old now. When I first got the game, I did most of the single player campaign, but the game itself is gearing more towards playing in multiplayer (Sport) mode, with different championships throughout the year and daily/weekly online races. At first, I was a bit nervous entering online races, as I felt I wouldn’t be good enough to play against other drivers playing the game for a much longer period of time, but once I got the hang of it, I started enjoying it a lot more. The fact that I had a sim-racing wheel and pedal set from before did help quite a lot, to not have to buy that as well. I have to say that I’m nowhere near being a top player of the game, those guys probably play the game for hours and hours a day, while I can only manage to play it maybe an hour or 2 a day every now and then. Despite that, I really enjoy having fun with the online races, and among other ideas I have had, I finally decided to start recording races and uploading videos to YouTube, although there’s still a lot of things that I can improve with that, but I’m getting there, slowly but surely. If you’d like to see the videos, you can check out my channel, and if you subscribe, it would be much appreciated. 🙂
When it comes to YouTube, there’s lots of other ideas and plans going on in the background, related to sim-racing, and when things go back to normal, hopefully next year, some real world racing and other motorsport content. That will go to a separate channel, which is currently still being set up properly to make it look a bit more professional, in a fun way of course. With that in mind, I also decided it was time to update my sim-racing equipment, meaning the steering wheel and the pedals. I have been thinking about that for some time as well, like with many of other things as you may know, I just needed that little push, or a nudge, to take me over the edge. After my “extensive” research, I decided to go with Fanatec, a company dedicated to sim-racing equipment of a higher quality range. At first I wasn’t really paying that much attention to that company, as I’ve seen some of the prices on their website, but with the research that I had done, it drove me more into that direction, when I saw that I was a tad wrong. It is true that the products are a bit pricey the higher up the ladder of products you go, but you can get a very high quality product for a reasonable price as well. I know there will be people saying how reasonable it is to spend any amount of money on things like that, but for some people (excluding myself here) that could be a way of life, playing video games and making money off of it, summarily said, and of course they would go for the best tools available for the amount of money they can afford to spend. When you play these games just for fun, and it’s more of a hobby than anything else, like myself, you really do think a bit more about spending that much money on something you don’t really use all the time. But since I want to maybe get a bit more serious with it in the future, getting a good setup for racing is a good first step, in my opinion. There are things I could still upgrade, that wouldn’t really cost that much, but for now I don’t have the need nor the space for that kind of things, who knows what will happen in the future though. 🙂
The wheel I decided to buy in the end is a Fanatec CSL Elite F1 Set, and I have added an optional load-cell brake mod to the bundle, as you can see on the photo above. To be honest, it did cost me quite a substantial amount of money, but as I’ve explained above, it is an investment for the future, and since I will be using it a lot more than I have used the previous wheel set, it wasn’t such a hard decision in the grand scheme of things. At the time of writing this post, I haven’t had the chance to fully test the wheel and see how everything works, since I’ve used it for just a few minutes, once I get some more playing hours in, you can expect another post dedicated just to the review of the set. What I can say for now for sure, is that I was already able to feel a major difference from the previous wheel. As mentioned, I haven’t been able to test it quite properly yet, I have to modify my playing space a little bit for it, but in the coming days, I’ll have more time to focus entirely on that and arrange everything perfectly.
Along with a change of hardware, I found my motivation again to continue learning how to use different software in regards to editing photographs, videos and anything else that might come my way. Before the first lockdown, I already started getting into Photoshop, but with the lack of motivation, and other priorities during the rest of the year, I put that aside for a bit, and picked it up again now, when I decided to get more into YouTube and content creation across various social media. I do know there’s a long way to go for me, especially because it takes a long time for me to really be happy with editing that I do, but practice makes perfect, so I’m sure I can get much better with it, just have to keep on working on it and try out new things.
When you look at the fact that we’re getting to the end of December, and a lot of these changes have happened in the last few weeks, I do have to say that the year is actually ending in a way that I wasn’t expecting it to, judging from what I felt like maybe even a month ago. After that many months of uncertainty, and being bombarded with bad news constantly, ending the year in a bit more cheerful and exciting way feels like a breath of fresh air. Let’s hope all of that carries over into the new year, and that 2021 will be a much better, interesting and fun year. 🙂
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