Occasional Tales

 Well, not quite. I’ve given up on online racing for the moment. I’d still like my gold badge for doing 1,000 races, but the whole process was so depressing (literally, not metaphorically) that I had to stop and don’t know whether I’ll ever bother going back. Series 16 is effectively done. All the cars are unlocked. All the Fords were repeat screenings. The Renaults were repeat screenings, but from other Horizon games. Series 17 has four new cars. Sorry, two. The Nissan 400Z and some antique from 1965 which is re­mi­ni­scent of the Cosmo. The other two are repeats – the Toyota MR2 GT and the Mitsubishi Galant. Until this morning, I’d only ever raced the MR2 GT once in Horizon 4. I think the Galant is a decent dirt racer, but I’d probably opt for the Subaru Legacy. Cue two types of declarations because of this: a.) hysterical fan­boys declaring how marvellous this all is; b.) hysterical fanboys demanding to know why some equally shrug­worthy cars aren’t being included. Overall, Series 1

  Races, yes; custom, not really. Alongside Horizon Open, which is a series of different championships across different classes, is custom racing, which limits player to a single category (road, dirt, etc.) and class (B, A, S1, S2) for the entire time. I started trying this mode again last week because earlier attempts had failed due to lack of players. At first it was still the usual – unbalanced races with some cheater/exploiter vanishing off into the distance. Most of the races had small lobbies of three or four players, and where the racing was even, it was also clean. Yesterday afternoon I went back to custom racing and found the lobbies somewhat larger much to my dismay. I was right to be dismayed because it was just like Horizon Open with more shoving. And thus I didn’t manage to complete a single championship because I kept quitting races from being shoved. I have no desire to race against such filth. What made it worse was that it was maliciously done. I suspect that one playe

I got frustrated with the drivatars in Forza Horizon 5. It’s why after over a year I’m still prestige 4. In Horizon 4 after my first year of playing the game, I’d reached prestige 6, but I can see it taking to the middle of 2023 before I achieve the same feat in FH5. The drivatars in Horizon 5 are frustrating because they’re contrary. Much of the time they’re not that big a nuisance, but it can be demoralising when in some races they seem to leap from Highly Skilled to Unbeatable, leaving you trailing in their wake. I’ve done 15-lap circuit races in which I’ve followed the lead drivatar for the bulk of the race before finally managing to take the lead. In Horizon 4 I made progress against the drivatars. In Horizon 5 when I think it’s time to bump up the level of difficulty, I decide it’s not worth it as it’s likely to lead to more irritation. But I was also getting bored with the game regardless of the drivatars. Even though I only started the series with Horizon 4, I suspected that I