Occasional Tales

And go where the game randomly tells me to go. My plan was to go back to Mexico to race the various Huracáns in the game, but I then recalled that there were the rest of the oval circuit accolades to be done, which then distracted me from the daily (which I did later on). Some of the accolades could be done in free roam. I cheesed the burnout skills accolade by switching my overpowered Nissan Pulsar to RWD and driving it against one of the barriers on the circuit. However, several of the accolades had to be done in races, which meant doing the oval race over and over and over until at some random point you completed the accolade. I tried to complete the awesome speed skills accolade with the Jesko, the Agera RS and the MB CLK GTR, and eventually got it, but the Koenigseggs kept understeering into the outer wall of the track, and nothing seemed consistently able to hit the right speed. The accolade to get some awesome speed skills highlighted why the game needs some sort of comprehensiv...

“You have been disconnected. No Horizon Arcade for you.” I started with the treasure hunt, which seems to have been near miss skills of some sort. Easy money. The weekly challenge was in the Ariel Atom, which is a car I like albeit one that tends to be a little floaty. More easy money. Horizon promo was also easy money (natch), which reminds me that in spite of my best efforts, I still haven’t seen the new Audi. Eventlab (1), Windy City, was dark, wet and had boost pads where they ought not to have been. Ugh. Eventlab (2), Mulegé Outskirts, was all right in the FE 911 GT3 RS, but the wriggly boarded bits were a pain in the arse. New rivals. Dunas Blancas in the STO. The car seemed fairly planted, but slid a bit. I thought it was AWD, but discovered afterwards that it was RWD. Decent handling, but I haven’t given it a proper go yet. A lot of whining about it being yet another Huracán, which is not, I admit, without some justification considering this update was the perfect opportunity f...

Slowly. I’ve managed to get FH5 to consistently run first time. In my quest to get it to do this, I decided to try launching the game from the xbox app since anything was worth a try when the game would only start about twice in twenty or more attempts. It’s very very slow to actually run, but it seems to be the answer to the question which has been plaguing me since I started playing FH5 on the Nitro 5. The new update arrived today and instantly there are issues with gears and one of my own which I’ve never encountered before. For reasons best known to the game, it’s doing weird things with gears such as putting you in reverse or making you change from 1st to 2nd twice (because you obviously enjoyed it so much the first time). My experience so far is finding myself randomly in first gear after races, but the doesn’t appear to be a particular trigger. I thought it might be from going up a level, but that appears not to be the case, but I wonder whether it might happen on circuits where...

The pain, the pain. That I’ve got this far this week is verging on the miraculous. As I said in my previous post, the fans on the Zephyrus died, which had me taking the machine to the local service centre where, I was eventually informed, it would be off for a week. I went through the long, arduous process of reinstalling FH5 on the Nitro 5. The game worked yesterday morning and I started doing the Festival playlist. It then refused to work after lunch, getting as far as the small splash screen, which would sit there in mute defiance before vanishing. I had a sudden thought that the problem was with the D:\ drive. I adjusted the settings and the game ran with some demur. This morning I had the same problem. The game would get to the small splash screen and then die. When I checked Event Viewer, the message seemed to be saying that parts of the system weren’t chatting, but if I went to Component Services, I could fix it, and did – several times without even a sniff of success. Even edit...

The fans killed it. It all started two days ago when FH5 started stuttering rather badly. At first I couldn’t work out what had gone wrong until I realised that the fans had died, which was causing the laptop to get very hot. I took the machine to the service centre yesterday, but it’ll be away for a week. I decided to reinstall the game on the Nitro 5, which took ages. This afternoon I launched FH5. There was a prolonged sync as I expected, but not as long as I feared. In spite of the pro­gress bar reaching 100%, it then claimed that it’d been unable to sync at all. I tried playing offline (I had something similar in FH4 once, but the game started without any problems, resuming right where I’d left off), but the picture with the AMG One and the other cars shrank, sat on screen for a bit, and then vanished. I tried again. Shorter sync, but I was unable to pro­gress any further. I tried a winsock reset, but that didn’t work, either. Submitted a ticket on support. I fear that I’ve once a...

Two cars to go. It’s been a busy two-and-a-half weeks for me. Mocks have meant endless invigilating intermingled with mar­k­ing, which have been followed by the first round of speaking exams with the Year 11s. I’ve not had the en­er­gy to post anything here for a few days. I PB’ed the Dunas jump in Sierra Nueva in my Jesko even though I wasn’t expecting to do so. For Neon Knights , the seasonal championship in Sierra Nueva, I immediately opted for the Tankpool, which had the launch to plough through the drivatars. The biggest pain was El Bosque because it was difficult to overtake, which allowed one of the drivatars to take an unassailable lead. And what was this all for? A cap. (By this time, I had both cars, and the Aventador J.) The weekly challenge in the Shelby Mustang GT500 was all right apart from the ultimate burnout skill which I only managed to achieve when I caught the front of the car on a step in Guanajuato and revved the car like mad. I did try the speed zone PR stunt in ...

But first, let’s crash out of the playlist. I started this week’s playlist with a CTD (crash to desktop) before restarting the game and taking a picture of the neon tank in Guanajuato. I had a look at the tile and noticed that the road was cobbled. I looked at the road I was on. It was cobbled. I looked behind me, and there was the tank on the wall. I retuned my Camaro Z28 for the weekly, which was mostly all right apart from the drag race, which was mostly vexatious. I ought to have rebuilt the Camaro, but I can’t be bothered. The Eventlabs were picturesque cityscapes, although I thought a dirt circuit didn’t fit with that style. I got a good super wheel spin out of the second event. I completed the break-the-cubes task without any bother. I thought the cubes might be in places that were hard to access, but there was no need to go up into the rocks. PR stunts. Hotel danger sign, Hoonigan RS200. The car flipped, but… the game didn’t mind. Phew! And I got another good super wheel spin (...

Cannot be undone. (Unless you click on the Reset button and get an out-of-date version of the game.) And that’s all the team stuff done in Sierra Nueva. I even managed to get the remaining alien artefacts… I mean, glowing crates this afternoon without the a­mount of grief I was expecting. I then did the re­mai­n­ing stuff for Horizon Raptors, with my S1 class 1965 Mini Cooper tearing up the rest of the dirt races, and that barge-like Dakar-style Mini dealing with the off road stuff. The only remaining things to do are the accolades for Horizon Open and Horizon Tour which I might do tonight or to­mor­row. What now? Weekly visits to Sierra Nueva to do the playlist and perhaps occasional voluntary visits there, but there’s no compelling reason for me to return un­less, for example, I decide to do the Goliath instead of the Titan as my long off-road race. I suspect that a lot of the enthusiasm for the Rally Adventure is a consequence of its novelty rather than any considered opinions about...

I didn’t even have to wait for the fat lady to sing. In spite of having other things to do over the past few days, I’ve managed to complete enough of the Rally Ad­ven­ture to unlock the events on the Festival playlist and do them. It wasn’t quite the time-sucking grind I was expecting. And that feels like the end of the expansion. Yes, I’ll finish off the events that are specific to the other two teams (I’ve completed Apex Predators), but I’m in no rush to do them. Sierra Nueva is more rugged than the main map, but doesn’t really offer much that’s different. There are some mesas, and the roads (as I’ve noted already) are all corners. There’s a ruined church, but I assume that PGG were forbidden from adding Aztec and Mayan ruins to a fantasy map. The twisty roads lead me to observe (as others have already been doing) that there’s something about the physics. Normally, I pride myself in being able to take corners competently (which means no drifting or slam­ming into barriers; well, avoi...