Occasional Tales

If you’ve built it once, build it several times. This week’s weekly was a pain not because of the events, but because each one demanded a different build of the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII. I had to engine-swap it to get a Hard Charger skill. I have no idea what this entails apart from going fast, but that wasn’t going to happen with the car merely maxed out from stock. I dealt with the collectibles while I was doing the last part of the weekly. At least this week it was easy enough to spot the piñatas The Eventlab tiles were both working properly this week. Purple Mountain Raceway was actually quite decent and would’ve been better if the surface had been proper tarmac. Modern sports cars or similar would’ve been better than FFA. Rally Rampage was for extreme off-road vehicles, and yet it was a dirt circuit. Why? It was also dark and foggy with lots of lovely glare from the headlights of my car. One lap would’ve been enough. In fact, I thought I was on my second lap when it transpired...

So much for the Barbie cars. “Have a couple of Barbie cars,” says PGG at random one day. I had thought we might have to do some themed Eventlab event, but the cars are gifts to remind Horizon-5-playing parents to take their target demographic children to see the film. “Barbie is much better than your stupid car game.” How so? “Because dressing up is a core game play mechanic with Barbie.” I drove round in the battery-powered Corvette for a bit. Ticked that box. ( Later. I watched AR12 Nick’s video on YouTube about the car, which gains next to nothing from being upgraded; it’s a bit like cosmetic upgrades in the game, the wings and spoilers that can’t be tuned, but which you’d add if you were a photographer, but have no point in races.) I took the Hummer EV (the Barbie one) up the volcano after tuning it. 318kmh, it claimed. I got about 100m from the danger sign that faces the main Horizon Festival site and the Hummer ground to a halt. I had to crab my way to the top so that I could d...

A little pain with your grind, sir? Made soggy by the vile weather here in the Workers’ Socialist Paradise™, I decided to take care of the Do(ugh)nut Media Story this afternoon. I cheated a bit by watching ISAD do the story on YouTube, and guessed that I could cheese at least some of it. Low car 1. Welcome to Low Team . This is one where you can ignore the roads a head across country to complete it without any penalties. 2. Every car at Horizon ranked . This one does have checkpoints, but the 1997 Nissan GT-R is surprisingly well behaved. (I prefer the 1993 GT-R.) 3. Déjà Vu . Another one you can cheese by going off road. The low car goes faulty and you crawl to the finish. 4. Bumper 2 Bumper . I had to redo this one because I decided to take a shortcut to the drift zone and then couldn’t find the drift zone. But this was also a colossal pain on a keyboard, and I barely scraped 150,000 points in a car that was impossible to drive. Another instance of the game punishing you for not play...

I started with the treasure hunt because you never know when it might be buggy. Snap of my Ford Focus, and it was all done. Some nice person sent me a Ford Focus as a gift. Why? Why would you do that? Delete the car if you don’t want it, but don’t go annoying other people. The weekly. Some rubbish old VW Golf which I hadn’t previously bothered with… I mean, I was saving it for a special occasion. Not as painful as I feared it might be, but not a car I’ll ever drive again unless I have to. The first daily of the season is only worth mentioning because it forces players to use the clunky test track that isn’t actually a test track. Rivals. Emira (aside: advertising for the Racing Car Pack?) for one and the AMG GT Black Series for the other. Both pretty decent cars straight out of the box. I feel I could’ve been a bit faster in Copper Canyon, but didn’t want to do anything stupid. Another playlist in which we’re expected to do an HA. Suddenly, I’m online, There are other players in Mexico...

It’s pink and it’s smooth, and I be afraid of it. The Racing Car Pack wasn’t listed in the MS shop. It wasn’t listed in the xbox app. A lot of people went to the obvious places to get the new DLC for Horizon 5. No, you had to update the game and purchase the new car pack from within the game. Meanwhile, a lot of people were outraged – outraged! I say – that they were expected to pay for this even though it was never listed as part of the Premium version of the game. (And we had the same nonsense with the HW Car Pack which came to FH4 as an extra.) I tried all of the cars stock. The Emira is nice to drive out of the box even on a keyboard. The Nissan Alti… (whatever) can be tuned, but is – let’s face it – another clown car. Floaty front end. The Pagani Huayra R can also be tuned out of the box, but suffers from the usual problem of being an RWD car with too much power. It also has, I think, the worst cockpit view in the game. The Saleen pickup is another F150, which I took up the side o...

This week’s treasure hunt (aka pathfinders) wasn’t that bothersome to complete. I had to do some backtracking to find the start of the pathfinder outside Playa Azul after spotting the red balloons through the trees. Two excellent wheel spins. And a Reliant Supervan. The weekly in the Hummer was mostly good apart from the final event, which was to do an HA when the game was perpetually declaring that I’d been disconnected. Fortunately, things went live, and there was a wreckage skills HA, which I joined just in the nick of time. I also did the daily in the Hummer, but because it’s an off-roader, I did a cross country race only to find afterwards that I was supposed to do a dirt race. As you’ll see below, using the wrong sort of car in the wrong sort of race crops up again. The spot for the photo was really NNW of the hotel. Another case of spotting the yellow bus with the yellow balloon. The Eventlab tile was working properly again. That’s two weeks in a row, which is now a world record...

The treasure hunt was another round of find the start of the pathfinder. For example, the clue said, “Go to Playa Tranquila”. I did, and there were the three bal­loons marking the end of the course. That meant doing the whole thing backwards to find the starting point. The second pathfinder in Ek’ Balam was con­fu­s­ing because the course seemed to go to the right when after a period of bafflement on my part, it wan­t­ed you to go to the left. It also didn’t help where the red balloons vanished from sight because of the ter­rain furniture impeding the view. In the third event I more or less headed straight for the finish. I like the BMW X5M and the weekly challenge was easily done. For the photo challenge, the trick seemed to be to look for a dirty yellow balloon once you managed to spot the hard-to-read Lago Blanco and thus identify where the camera equipment was to be found. The location of the collectables was about as precise as claiming that pi has a value of 4. I explored quite a...

When I got FH4, I looked at the tuning settings and didn’t bother because they were incomprehensible. My first attempt at tuning was stretching out the final drive after seeing the YouTuber, DUBS, do the same. The next major step came from watching a Shmee150 video in which Tim Burton talked about changing the car setting to corsa (or something like that) and the effect it had on the springs. I started doing the same with generic settings for the springs. I did some wild guessing with the settings for the ARBs, but the game is so forgiving that it didn’t seem to mind. Things got a little more serious when I ran into weight-based settings in a YouTube video. I know these get dismissed, but they had two advantages in my tiny, non-technical mind: first, they made sense, and second, they could be calculated exactly. There was no need use generic spring settings any longer, although as I said above, the game is quite forgiving. I also wondered about tyre pressures and adopted my GT3, GT4, r...

We start as usual with the treasure hunt, which was to do the next three pathfinders. Pantano de La Selva was a nuisance because I found the endpoint, but every time I tried to trace my way back to the start, I kept looping round to the finish until I noticed some balloons that were obscured by the woods. The weekly in the RAM Power Wagon was all right even if the thing is a barge. Why on earth does it have a dirt racing perk when it’s a chubby American off-roader? The Eventlab tile was properly live this time, but the course needed some more walls on the approach to the water section because I couldn’t see where I was meant to go. Spaghetti maps don’t help. The photo challenge. Location: the top of the rocky cliffs which are too far from Mulegé for the directions from there to make much sense. I think of the cliffs as being closer to the main festival site. Fortunately, the game wasn’t perpetually disconnecting me, which meant I was able to do an HA for that part of the play­list. Ind...