Occasional Tales

It sort of works. I decided to do the weekly playlist before continuing to work on the Rally Adventure so that I could then do the playlist events stemming from that while only worrying about the remaining dailies. I started with the treasure hunt in case that’s still a problem. Today I had to drift down Cara Este in my Shelby Cobra. It was all going well until the car started oscillating from side to side and the overly sensitive game said I’d failed, thus forcing me to repeat the ex­er­cise. The chest was in the middle of the stadium. Even I couldn’t miss it. Weekly in the HSV Gen-F. Appalling race. Well, there was a race and my driving was appalling, although the car is a barge. Eventlab(1) was a very arty, neon affair. Eventlab(2) had a city look. Both tiles were live. Two new Rivals events. One was in the Lexus LC500 which merely reminded me how much I don’t like RWD cars with ex­ces­sive power and no handling. The other car was the Rimac Nevera which is AWD and sort of drivable.

Night and day, you are the one. Series 19 has been revealed. It seems that PGG was aiming for the American market. Cadillacs? Boring, blocky and ugly. A Lexus that players are overexcited about because… er… I have no idea why. The Ri­mac Nevera will be, I predict, barely any different from the Concept 2. Good for PR stunts, but that’s about it. They’re all genuinely new as opposed to being re­cy­cled from older Horizon or Motorsport games, which isn’t that much of a recommendation. At least the ATS GT is back because that’s one of the cars I’m missing. Where, though, is the F8 Tributo? I want it back. Body kits. I’m sure the piccie people will love these, but for serious racing, I’m sceptical about poser up­grades. I slapped a wide body on something a few month ago and it couldn’t take corners. Reverted to the stock body and the car was drivable. But why not a wider variety of wings instead? Why not tunable stock aero on cars that have it or tunable aero where the rear wing can be some

Several attempts later. Nothing was working properly. The xbox app seemed dead, the xbox console companion spun on its wheels and tried to send me off to the xbox app, and I wasn’t logged on to the game bar. I eventually managed to log on to all three, but I felt that the shadow of the problem had imprinted itself on the apps. I wasn’t confident that the game would run in spite of yesterday’s successful outing. On the first occasion, the game loaded as far as my car arriving home before the screen froze and the game went CTD. On the second attempt, all went well, and there were even other players in the world. I did the daily. Desierto in one of the innumerable Mitsubishi Evos, the model X, I think. I then thought that I’d try the Eliminator, expecting that it would crash like the last time. I spawned near the start of the Marathon as I normally do. There was a Peugeot 205 in the Festival site, but another player got to it first and challenged me. This was a mistake because I was out i

Really, game? You’re going to work properly this time? At lunchtime I fired up Horizon 5 which… actually worked first time. I did the treasure hunt and the weekly (just to be on the safe side), and the photo challenge. There was an nVidia update this afternoon. FH5 splut­tered abruptly, but worked on the second attempt after the driver update. I did the daily and ended up doing Street Scene races in Horizon Open. Muffed Jungle Descent by dodging traffic and missing a checkpoint which I didn’t even see. Didn’t come last and just managed to avoid getting DNF’ed. The first Eventlab event was an interesting mashup round the Mangrove Scramble. The second Eventlab event was all right, but nothing to get me overly excited. I PB’ed the danger sign and the drift zone, and one-shotted the speed trap across country in a Jesko. Horizon Tour was curious. In the first race I was in my FE Puma behind a driver in an FE Puma who was fast but kept slamming into walls. Looks like they were have connectio

Random gaming shit. Yesterday it took me twice to launch FH5 before the game actually started. The weekly challenge was still not working, but I did manage to do the daily. Today it took four attempts before the game worked. I had an invalid profile three times and one insta-CTD, but the game started and so did the weekly. Yes, after six days I finally managed to do it with a little help from the forums because I’d otherwise still be sear­ch­ing for the donkey piñata (just near the start of the trailblazer) in Guanajuato. I then tried to do the daily, but was baffled as to why it wasn’t happening. Oh, it wasn’t five speed skills in Gua­na­jua­to, but in Playa Azul. Even when I was in the right place, the game didn’t tell me I’d completed the task. Am I likely to get 100% completion this week for the first time ever? I may be. I did the Trial the other day because the daily wasn’t working. Actually, that went well until I decided to be too clever by half and turned in too soon ahead of

The weekly is dead. After a catastrophic Friday, Horizon 5 actually worked yesterday. I was even able to fast travel without the game crashing. I started with the treasure hunt which could be ac­t­i­v­ated by doing any jump even though it looked like you had to do that river jump on the south side of the map. I got the two dailies done, and the Eventlab events, both of which were fine, but nothing I’d want to do on a regular basis. The Subaru STi was a good choice for Rally to Rumble , but Sprint Finish was one of those seasonal cham­pionships with a special set of cars whose mem­bers no one knows. I ended up in the Nissan GT-R LM, which seemed to be quite decent. The jump was the biggest bother out of the PR stunts, being a matter of trying to point the car in the right direction to effect a landing without it thumping into one of the props in the stadium or tumbling off them. The HW PR stunt took a couple of goes, but wasn’t a bother. The seasonal cham­pionship went the usual way wi

Mostly fine, mostly not fine. For most of the week, FH5 has been functioning nor­m­ally. The game has been starting without demur and I’ve been able to get the dailies done – until yesterday when the game crashed twelve times. The game crashed on the loading screens even getting as far as the final animation before freezing and dying. The game claimed I didn’t have a valid profile, but I bloody well do. The game had fast travel issues. The first time, it sent me into the void; the second time it froze and crashed. The game froze and crashed a few times after I started driving around in free roam. The game froze and died when I went into my garage to change cars, but the tiles were blank. And yet FH5 might function as it ought to sometime today. Last Sunday, it didn’t function at all. There’s no obvious pattern to its behaviour, and this has only been a major issue for the current series. Previously, crashes have been rare. I reported all this to support, who advised me to report it on

C. Bing, Episode of Friends (if it was made in 2023). I despair. Ever since the start of Series 18 of Horizon 5, the game has frequently failed to launch. Although it’s done this in the past, it’s got worse during this season. The game often crashes somewhere in the loading screen, and it’s not unusual for it to take four attempts to get FH5 to run. But wait! There’s more! It’s now told me four times that I don’t have a valid profile even though I make sure that I’m logged on to the MS gaming subsystem before I start. This is a habit since the Great Crash in Horizon 4 over two years ago. The other day it claimed the English language pack was not installed and switched the game language to Chinese. When I ran the game and went to switch the language back to English, the game crashed while I was in the settings menu. When I did eventually manage to change the language back to normal, the game refused to pass the screen where it says “Loading… Please wait” (it did this twice). A check of

 Let’s start with yesterday. There was a patch for FH5 yesterday which I discovered by chance when I checked the MS shop. I in­stalled it and ran the game three times before it stopped crashing. I dealt with the daily and then re­mem­bered that I wanted to see whether the Eliminator was playable because I’d been hearing there were issues. It didn’t disappoint. First challenge, the game froze, and went CTD. That was yesterday. Today it was time to do the new Festival playlist. It was… unremarkable. Even the Hoonigan Bel Air managed to stay on its wheels in spite of being a fally-over clown car, and the Eventlab tiles were actually functioning properly. I should mention the FH4 weekly in a rally monster, aka the Grindathon. 20 ultimate drift skills, 15 points from speed zones. If it was a piece of writing, I’d call it space-filling waffle. Speaking of Grindathons, that would seem to be the second expansion. If my maths is correct, you’ll have to do 33 races to unlock the Goliath. But wha

This week in Mexico. An auspicious start to the new series as I was initially unable to access any of the MS gaming services (and OneDrive was also inaccessible). Third time this has happened in about the past week. It comes right, but I don’t know why it’s been happening in the first place. Perhaps the Oriental Balloon Jockey Club has been having a tantrum. Who knows. The weekly challenge car was the Hoonigan Escort Cosworth (1991, I believe). The Hoonigan lineup looks to be the business, but most of them are clown cars, and this one was no exception. In spite of modifying the tuning, I couldn’t take a corner without it sliding to excess. I didn’t manage to do the Horizon Arcade until this morning because as usual, the game kept telling me I’d been disconnected. My drifting skills may not be up to much, but I ended up with a group of players who largely seemed to make me look like a master of the trade. On my first visit to Mexico, neither of the Eventlab tiles were live, and I had to