Occasional Tales

The treasure hunt clue was a little more obvious this time. The location is Meoto Iwa Rock. I couldn’t remember the name, but knew what to look for. In other news, the first expansion will allegedly be out on the 21st of January. I already owned the BMW Turbo 2002. All went well. I took a photo. I got some clothing. I got so excited that I bought the Lexus LFA. The curse that is B-class modern rally returned in Bee Happy , which rewarded us with the Coronet Super Bee, which I don’t have in this game (but do in others). We had to do Kawazu Nanadaru yet again. I got caught out by the sharp right-hander at the bottom of the hill in Cherry Field Trail . It’s not a race I’ve done that often, but I suspect I’ve botched that corner just about every time. Ghost Hunter was A-class rally monsters (not exactly original) doing cross-country. What?! I picked the Opel Manta for the job, but the car wasn’t suited to the task. There was quite a bit of yawing in Takashiro , which had me wondering whe...

 I guessed that the treasure was to be found in the north corner of the spaceport. I was right. First time in ages. I needed to do Aston Martin Nights to get the DB5. I used the DB7. Festival Chase was awful in cockpit view with all the spray coming off the road, Matsumi Climb switched to daylight, but the additional traffic didn’t actually affect the race ’cos it was way easier to see. Shimanoyama Charge was a repeat of the preceding race, but at night. And then I was able to do the weekly except I upgraded the car before leaving my house, which meant I had to do a drivetrain swap to spend CR20,000 on the car, leave the house, and return to undo all of it. A couple of Street Scene races. Gods! An HSP interrupted this, but this week I jumped on it, and then one-shotted the SZ task. And as I was in the DB5, this was also a good opportunity to deal with the photo to acquire yet another stupid phrase that no sane adult would ever utter. Rally on Dirt was B-class total rally, but ...

Yes, I manfully searched for the blasted treasure chest. Yes, I almost certainly passed it, but it was night time, which seems to be the game’s default state. Yes, I noted that the road in the background was dirt, not tarmac. I had to google the location so as not to spend an hour or so without a single sighting. It was on the south side of the Taiyaki Scramble , roughly due north of the start of Kawazu Nanadaru over the other side of the hill. I took a photo. I got another dumb reward. Again, I had to do a seasonal, Country Pickups , to get the Jaguar C-X75 for the weekly challenge. I started the races in the WP F-150, but didn’t like the handling and thought to switch to the CJ5 Renegade, which I then discovered isn’t in the game. I looked at the FJ40, but lighted on the Wrangler Rubicon, which I had to engine-swap to get it to the top of B class. It still managed to feel sluggish. For Edogawa , I slightly road-tuned it, which seemed to give it a significant advantage over the driva...

I already had the 1999 Lotus Elise, hence there was no immediate need to do the seasonal. In fact, this has been quite a good week overall for getting new cars from wheel spins (and pictures of cars that have otherwise eluded me). I wasn’t sure of the point of 3 laps of Shimanoyama now that it’s a formal drift circuit. The photo needed to be taken inside Shirakawa, but the exact location appears not to have mattered. Unlike Horizon 5, it seems that when someone else breaks a mascot, it’s gone till it respawns. I managed to get 12, but had to go away and do other things before returning to complete the job. In Off-road Scramble , I drove the car to win the car. Taiyaki wasn’t the pain that it can be, but the drivatars seem to be less prone to aiming for apexes these days. I used the Ginetta Junior to do Toys on the Road . Tokyo Railway Sprint was at night, which was a nuisance because I don’t tend to bother with sprint races and don’t know the course that well. I managed to one-shot ...

I couldn’t even begin to guess where the chest for the treasure hunt was. I spent an hour fast travelling round the Ito Region for possible locations before I googled it and found that it was beside the railway line south of the junction that’s south of Ito Airfield. I’d been through the area several times without luck and for some reason, other players weren’t appearing on the map no matter how close they were so that I couldn’t identify the correct place by looking for a cluster of grey dots. Colossally annoying. I did Cross-Country Heroes because I’ve never got the 2020 Defender and had no intention of buying it if I was going to get it as a reward. Two of the races had to be the least cross country races in the game with that asinine thing at the docks and then the ridiculous one in the city. I assume that after the disappointing and irritating CC race in Guanajuato as a sad replacement for the one in Edinburgh, PGG decided to stick one in Tokyo, which is an urban area, not a rura...

The new update arrived this morning. Quite a few of the comments on Facebook were the usual whine about Japanese cars. No, the topic is the British Automotive update. Focus, children. What are we getting? A new Bentley Continental (probably marketing), but I still want to see the GT3 version return from FH4. An old Ginetta GT40 Junior that already looks rather retro as if it came out of those Cars films (the current one looks better, but is marketed “for 14-17 year olds”). Is this going to be better than that awful E-Type wannabe from FH5? But where’s the GT4 car or the G56? And from the antique end of the paddock, some old Vauxhall Astra. Let me listen. No, I can’t hear anyone screaming for it. The FE Jaguar XJ-S is probably going to be an undrivable mess without a drivetrain swap, although controller players will be all right. I’ll probably have to buy the standard XJ-S (which I had out in FH4 and as usual, the drivatars were all in the same car). I expect that Drift Attack will be o...