XSquare's Photo Journal

[XSquareStickIt]

I see you've stumbled upon my severe mediocrity. I'm not good at photography at all, but I do enjoy it nonetheless. Don't expect anything too ultra fancy—all I do is bump up brightness and contrast a little to make the shot pop more and hope that whatever I see on my PC screen matches that on my TV screen (hint: it never does. That's my excuse if you haven't already worked it out).

I can finally paint my Amemiya FD Innocent Blue Mica! Only took PD twelve whole years, but better late than never, right?

Gosh, there's just something about vending machines in a parking lot that just screams "JAPAN" to me. Just by plopping a car onto the scene, I already feel like I'm transported there. I just... really wish I could back the car further into the parking lot so as to not jut out onto the road like that, but ehh.

At long last, we have a facelifted RX-8 in the game! Only took PD twelve whole years, but better late than never, right? The plate I made for it is a replica of the one from Mazda's R&D Centre in Yokohama, which gets loaned out to the press from time to time. I believe that that car was the one scanned by PD, because gosh knows how hard it is to find a stock, pristine cheap JDM sports cars. And so I took it around Yokohama's Scapes to play around a little (seeing as the RWD physics of GT7 is... oof, at the moment).

A habit of mine ever since a good shot gone horribly wrong is that I make the darks on both the car and background so obscenely dark that they melt into each other indiscernibly that you can't tell where the tyre meets the ground. Otherwise, I fear the car just looks badly photoshopped into the shot, since I do tend to make the cars brighter than the background.

The reflections on these wet floor shots are just...

My sister is a fan of GT-Rs ever since we both played Gran Turismo 2 in split screen on our PS1 way back when. She's also much more of a fan of Chinese culture than I am, and so it just felt natural to place her childhood dream car into Yokohama's Chinatown. I'm so surprised that there's a Chinatown in Yokohama! I've been there... twice! And I didn't know!

To be honest, my experience with GT7 has been horrendously mixed. The negativity on the forums is getting to me, but they all make very valid and pressing points against the game, one of which is the horrible economy and the FOMO cars. When I play the game then, it's only to grind Fisherman's Ranch to buy the limited–time cars, and it's gotten to a point where, instead of being an escape from reality, GT7 is reminding me more and more about my real work life. And it sucks.

Fortunately, I'm able to find an escape in Scapes. There have been so many new Scapes added to the game where it genuinely feels like too much to wrap my pea brain around. The Scapes in Japan especially, do a phenomenal job of making me feel like I'm travelling there. Customising cars and shooting Scapes is a lot more enticing than buying expensive cars I'll never drive. I think Scapes is the one portion of GT7 that really, really made me smile.

I'm usually not a fan of military stuff (ask any Singaporean male), but the Izumo–Class Destroyer has some really astounding scenes set within, and I finally managed to convince myself to part with HALF A MILLION to buy a NA2 NSX-R (that I'll never drive...). I've always wanted a bare carbon bonnet NA2 with the "NSX-R" logo on the sides of its rear wing like the 2001 concept model in GT4. Now I finally can do that!

Another reason why I decided to shoot on the Destroyer is that the scene just seemed to fit the NA NSXes so well! The NSX's canopy has been cited to be inspired by those of fighter jets', and so the car just seemed right at home on an aircraft carrier. And those reflections on the ground!

More to come soon, I guess? I think? I hope? Assuming I don't succumb to financial ruin both IRL and in–game, that is.

 

[XSquareStickIt]

So you know how in the first post, I kept lamenting how the photo I see when shooting on my over–exposed TV looks very different from the screen on my PC? Well, due to... certain circumstances, I have started using Remote Play on my PC to play GT7 on my PS5, and it occurred to me that I should do photo shoots in Remote Play to take more normal looking photos! This post contains the first batch of remotely taken photos, after I somehow found myself in a position wherein I can more freely buy cars I'll never drive.

I don't think I'm in the minority when I say that Seattle Circuit is one of my personal favourite circuits in the series, and while it's such a shame that the circuit will likely never return, it is at least a little heartwarming to see a few Scapes locations shot in Seattle. I then thought which car I'd like to plop down onto Seattle, and I didn't have to think for long—Nothing screams "Gran Turismo 2" to me more than a late 90s Viper in Seattle.

Another benefit of being able to work from my PC is that I can Google a car's image in one window, make decals in another, and then cross reference it to the game running in yet another, all on the same screen! The 2nd gen Viper ACR's logo was a pain to find, and I'm definitely glad I didn't have to jump between my PC and PS5 to make changes and edits. Urgh, screw that!

I think that, because graphical fidelity was much lower in the older games, we as kids needed to use our imagination more to fill in the gaps that the graphics couldn't fill. A few cars looked so much cooler in the PS1 graphics than they do in real life, oddly enough. The 2nd gen Viper however, looks exactly the badass I had envisioned it to be in my kid mind, and it looks no less a cartoon character even when rendered in the 500,000 polygons or 300. Something about its shapes, its creases, its stare, just screams "supercar" to me. There may be faster cars. There may be cars that handle better. But no car lights up that inner child in me quite like a Viper.

I was scrolling through some American Scapes location trying to familiarise myself with the new locations added to GT7 when I came across this scene, and I just HAD to plop my camo truck onto it. This so far is the only car I've applied a wide body to, because I really dislike mods that I can't undo, and I only did this because Luca won't shut up till I wide bodied something.

Is it just me, or are most wide bodies in GT7 just... lame? Like there's hardly any difference made to the car's shape at all, and you'd have to be intimately familiar with how the car looked stock to tell it has been wide bodied. Were you able to tell at first glance this truck was wide bodied?

If I were to think of wide body cars, the RWB Porsches or the GReddy Fugu Z are the first to come to my mind: shaved off body panels covered with bolted on tacky arches with panel gaps big enough to drink from. Or, you know, something crazy and impractical like the Atenza Gr.3's widening, for example. I know it's a lot of work now with the aforementioned 500,000 polygons each car is made of, but the feature just feels so half baked to me.

Street racers unite! I'm not really good at personalising cars and imbuing a sense of personal identity into them, and this was pretty much my best attempt. I made the Roadster TC back in Gran Turismo Sport, and it's how I imagined my Roadster would look like if I had to daily a track prepped one, so that probably looks the most authentic. The Amemiya FD... I dunno. I just felt an odd urge to de–wing one and see what it'd look like as a Kanjo cruiser. The Atenza is... what I imagine a ricer with more money than taste would do to a car.

Another one of those scenes where, with just one look, I knew I had to shoot a certain car at. I was attempting to recreate the 2008 Viper ACR now that we can equip aftermarket aero parts onto our cars, but I was having such a torrid time with it. Who knew aligning simple stripes and making them look right would be so much work?! Add onto that the fact that the 2006 SRT10 Viper has an odd glitch with its rear wing where it mirrors decals put on it for some reason, and aaargh. I had to angle this shot just right to hide the stripes on the rear wing, but I think the shot works still in spite of that.

I had to resort to masking the mirrored stripe on the rear wing, which covered up the beautiful bare carbon fibre wing 😭

The 2008 Viper ACR and 2009 Corvette ZR1 are probably my last childhood heroes, as I seem to have outgrown having heroes since. These two cars will always have a very special place in my heart and bring back memories of Need For Speed: World and Gran Turismo 5.

Speaking of Gran Turismo 5, Kyoto's Gion makes a return in Gran Turismo 7 as a Scapes scene, and it looks SO much better in GT7! I bought a Copen just to shoot here, because the Copen at Gion was such a vivid memory for me back in the early 2010s. The girl I liked back then said she likes the Copen, and so I bought one to test drive it. Now with a livery editor, I can put on a plate with a set of numbers that meant a lot to her as remembrance.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rambles. More to come soon, maybe? Provided my PS5 doesn't melt itself while I'm sleeping or at work.