Occasional Tales

After driving the 2023 BMW M2 in Rivals, where it was immediately apparent that the handling was a little sus, I decided to skip an RWD build and slap AWD on. I went for a full S1-class build as well. The car was all right round the sweeping turns down Copper Canyon , but didn’t like sharper corners, noticeably understeering. Round Plaza Circuit , which I know well, the car was prone to sliding through some of the technical sections because it had too much power and too little handling. In spite of some tinkering on my part, the car still needed a lot of finesse through the corners. I then tried an A-class build for which there’s not a lot of PI to play with. Round Los Jardines , the car struggled to take the lead and remain ahead of the drivatars. I felt it was a bit too chunky and revised the build, adding sport weight reduction (race weight reduction sends the car into S1 class). Stock tyres, but they seemed all right. There was a pesky Audi RS5 in Tierra Próspera and Stadium Circu

Sierra Nueva, thou dangling pustule on Satan’s arse. This week for the treasure hunt I thought I’d use a car that had some presence. I chose the Warthog, which turned out to be overpowered and too chunky. What’s going to happen next week? Will we need a car that’s half as wide and twice as long for half the course, and twice as wide and half as long for the other half? All very tiresome. The weekly in the bloated Ford F-450 passed without any issues. What’s the reward for a weekly these days? Still 200PFs? The photo challenge got me clothes. So, either like Dobbie, I bugger off, or like Ken, I think I’m fashionable. What I’m really thinking: “I thought this was meant to be a racing game.” The collectibles weren’t too much of a pain, but the overly long night was. Why did PGG have to pander to the nighttime kiddies when there’s no screaming need for it outside of Street Scene. If you want night, switch your monitor off and drive round. The Eventlab tiles were functioning again. I wonder

Once again, Igor, it’s alive! Yes, FH5 is working again, although I feel the solution is specific to me rather than a general fix. When I got home yesterday afternoon, I tried FH5 again, but it refused to sync and crashed when I clicked on Reboot (well, died without a whimper). I then tried Minecraft Bedrock and was able to log in to my MS account. There was also an nVidia update for which I used my VPN partly to make sure that I go to a website that speaks English and partly because the download is probably faster. I installed the patch and ran FH5 again, but left my VPN running. I don’t normally do that, but thought an experiment was in order. The game synced and I was finally off to Mexico. I started with the treasure hunt, quickly spotting the location of the obstacle course not all that far from the Horizon Apex site because I thought it might be tucked away to the left somewhere. I’ve been hearing stories of people heading all the way to Playa Tranquila. I made the mistake of usi

Yes, Redmond, I blame you. The recent 0x0 fiasco with Horizon 5 has never really been fixed. I moved the game from C:\ to D:\ and back again, and that sort of fixed things, but not really (and my game was almost certainly already in the C:\XboxGames folder). The latest issue may be the thin end of the wedge in that I tried running the game today only for it to sync… wait for it… not sync and instead give me a message telling me to reboot the game if I want to try syncing again, or go to the title and risk finding that I’m back on square one, having lost all of my progress. What can I do? Syncing can be an absolute nightmare with these games because it can be so contrary. I have no control over this process and no way of finding out why it’s not working. I tried syncing FH4 for eight hours on three occasions, and it was because of the whole faulty system that I lost all my progress in the game back in late 2020. Syncing is deeply unreliable and the inability of players to consciously sa

Oh the pain. The pain. As everyone must know by now, FH5 has been being a colossal pain for the past few days since the latest update, dishing out a 0x0 error. The solution, campers, seems to be to move the game to the D:\ drive (where it didn’t work at all) and then back to the C:\ drive (where is did work). It should also be in the C:\XboxGames folder (mine is by default). The game now “works” in that it skips the big splash screen, may take ages to do anything, might sync successfully or might not, might crash at this point or might not, might switch on the on-screen reader, might give you the fallback Festival playlist, might load you into a world filled with players, and then might disconnect you for all the rest of the session, but allow you to do multiplayer stuff (but not every time). From what I can tell, this seems to be an MS problem. The MS shop seems to have issues, and the xbox app. I uninstalled the Minecraft Launcher from my main laptop because something went wrong with

The good, the bad and the ugly. Cue Sergio Leone music. I’ve just watched JakeXVX’s video review of Series 25. For anyone who uses Eventlab, this is a major update to that, but I myself am there to race, not play with the in-game Lego set. On the basis of the latest two Eventlab events, it’d be nice to have creations that a proper, clear circuits or sprints or trail races and not muddly, mini-map messes. There, I alliterated. See what this kind of novelty map creation makes me do. The BMW 850CSi is back from FH4 as the first series reward car. I tried it again (probably for the second time ever) just recently with updated tuning. It was still rubbish. The Gunther Werks 911, the second series car, is all right, but another repeat screening when it ought to have been the ghastly pig Porsche (the 917/20). There are several repeat exclusives which have been missing from my garage since I reset Horizon 5 and got a save game that dated from the Renaissance. These are cars that have almost en

The Trial? Perhaps. I started with the treasure hunt for the usual reason – you never know when the game might go mental because you left this till last. You had to drive your Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio to the cloverleaf junction on the motorway. Easy money – or so you might think. When I smashed the treasure chest, my car got stuck to the remains, and I struggled to extricate myself. Much wheel spin and reversing and then much wheel spin and going forwards. I also triggered the weekly by driving the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio. Not too tedious, but a drag race? Is this a taster for the next series, which is rumoured to be drag racing. I would say, “Please don’t”, but I fear that tomorrow we’re going to be disappointed by the horrible truth. The Eventlab tiles were functioning again. It’s a pity the brains of the creators weren’t. The first one looked like a figure-8 track, but was an hourglass with a very pinched waist. The other event ended in this baffling spaghetti-like mess which I had t

Smash his legs into jam with red-hot sledgehammers. Spread the paste on sun-baked camel turds buttered with rancid hyena shit. Make him eat those delicious sandwiches. The Festival painlist [sic!] can annoy me, and then there’s this week’s offering which descended into a chasm of immeasurable frustration that brought me close to being physically sick. The treasure hunt was straightforward. Quick danger sign in the Stratos and I got my loot. The weekly in the Fiat 124 Spider was all right apart from the game not telling me that I’d completed tasks. The Eventlab tiles were working this week. I didn’t see any flying pigs, but can’t always be looking out of my window. Av. Paradise: Circuito Callejero was an urban version of Sierra Nueva, being a tiresome amount of start-stop-start-stop. I kept understeering at the same hairpin and can only be grateful that we only had to do two laps of this thing for another 458 Italia. (I like the car and am not complaining.) Pipeline Stadium Circuit (Ni