Occasional Tales

I fast travelled in my 1953 Corvette to a spot near the telescope, drove towards it, and completed the treasure hunt. I spent the credits on that race suit, although I haven’t seen clothing in the wheel spins in ages. I did the weekly in the Impreza. No problems. Even got six stars in drift zones in two goes. Only one Eventlab event this week, the beautifully made, but rather annoying Take no Michi “ Night Race ”. In essence it was a squitty little cross-country race which we had to do in rally cars. Was this meant to be some sort of drift circuit? The photo challenge was to take a picture of an off-road car with Uxmal in the background. We had to use the new Raptor for the monthly rivals. It chugged round River Scramble and seemed pretty decent stock. Vista del Mar in the new Mustang was a bit more fraught. Early braking need for sharp corners, and I twice just managed to avoid clonking a wall. One PR stunt. Not the worst danger sign for the possibility of hitting trees, but annoyi...

I got the update for FH5 this morning, but had to leave my laptop going because I needed to head off. [ Feel free to skip the next bit .] Came home at lunchtime. Thought it was a good idea to reboot the laptop. Restarted the xbox app. There was the new car pack listed on the FH5 page. Unusual. The new car packs normally appear in the game first and only get listed later in the xbox app. I tried to buy said car pack, but kept getting an error message. I ran the game and tried to buy the car pack, but was thwarted again. When I tried to do the daily, the inputs from my keyboard were all haywire because the machine had switched to Chinese without asking me first. I rebooted the laptop again, but still the language bar was in Chinese. That made me suspect there was an update for W11, and I was right. Got home, restarted the laptop, and… No, no car pack for you. Took a guess that I needed to run my VPN and was right. W11 seems be doing a Clippy. “I see you’re in a highly censorious dictator...

Unlike prominent YouTubers who are obliged to declaim how marvy [sic] splendid each new FH5 update is, I’m not constrained to keep PGG happy by making similar declarations. The past two series have been a shrug. The car packs have been a partial to complete shrug. Series 32, on the other hand, seems to mostly be heading back in the right direction. The series cars are repeat screenings. The Acceleration Car Pack cars are a bit above middling in my view, although I wonder whether the drivatars are going to massacre everyone in the Supervan 4 as they do in the Supervan 3. Nice to see Ginetta arrive in the game. The seasonal reward cars are mostly one good, one shrug, but that reflects my comparative indifference to off-road racing. Week 1, we get the Artura which as I suspected, is the new 570S (watch the car masteries and the stock tuning settings be the same as the 570S’s). In week 2, the 2020 Audi TT falls into the same category as the VW Golfs we’ve got over the past six months or s...

Min is about to meet Max. Probably. The treasure hunt seemed to be a matter of smashing things up in the golf course in a Golf. The game then randomly informs you that you’ve achieved this feat. The weekly was in the Sagaris, which is a car I like, although I confess that I drive it less often in FH5 than I do in FH4. I managed to do the speed trap task in two goes in a stock car. We also had to do a Street Scene race. Oh joy. Eventlab (1), Kerb your Braking! had to be on Eventlab Island (“The flattest place on Earth!”) in the dark. Actually, it’s not a bad circuit, but I didn’t need the silly kerbs. Eventlab (2), Horizon Festival Loop was a tedious ramble with some decent design elements. Also in the dark. This week we had to use Minis for the PR stunts. I started with the big, fat barge… What? Yes, I know. Yes, well, you can blame BMW for turning Minis into fat little barges. I started with that really bargey… bargy… barge-y… that big, fat red off-roader. It worked with La Mesa , b...

AR12 Gaming posted a video called What can FH6 learn from FH5 ? I thought I’d post some thoughts here about it. The game could do with proper racetracks (plural) to get away from racing on terrible road-based tracks. As I’ve said more than once, where’s the Falcon Speedway from Lego Valley? We’ve seen some good Eventlab circuits of late, but we’ve also seen a lot of rubbish featured in the game. I also fear what sort of nonsense we might get if popular Eventlab maps affect the FH6 map in some way. Exclusives. I see quite a few posts on Facebook from players who seem all confused about how to get new cars or players who have missed out on a car and don’t seem to grasp that they might eventually see it again. Regular returns in, say, seasonal championships rather than massive gaps between first and subsequent appearances might help. I wonder whether the Backstage Pass will return, which helped me in FH4 to get various cars that hadn’t appeared in all the time I’d been playing the game. ...

The treasure hunt was a matter of doing a jump in the Esseesse, which even in D class managed to complete the task. The weekly in the Renault Clio Williams was easy money. Eventlab (1). Nelipo Track (Night). Not bad, but the layout on the mini-map had annoying overlaps. Although courses might crossover parts, the path should otherwise be discrete so as not to annoy me… I mean, annoy players. There was also on weirdly placed checkpoint ahead of a sharp left, but I wonder whether like last week, this was meant to mark the braking zone. Eventlab (2). FBMR GP8 Ram Jam . What an absolutely opaque title for a decent track based in Guanajuato. Eventlab (3). Link City Full Throttle . I assume the idea was shortcuts, but that only works when you know the course. Otherwise, utterly ludicrous. The SWS was one-third good. I got the HA done, which is much less bothersome, although in the second round several other players appeared, which had me worried that I might be doing all the work on behalf ...

The weekly challenge was once again a straightforward process, and the Stratos is a decent cheese wedge to drive. I one-shotted all the PR stunts in the Peugeot T16. Two rubbish SWSs and one that was one-third all right. This was after two excellent wheel spins from the weekly. Eventlab (1). Ramen Autodromo . As I set off in this one, I noticed that this seemed to be a spaghetti track, but found myself pleasantly mistaken. The creator seems to understand curves, and this was a very flowing kind of circuit. It’s a pity there’s no way to properly smooth the joins between the pieces of track, though. Eventlab (2). Jardín Día . This, on the other hand, was an annoying spaghetti circuit. I’m surprised that we weren’t in hypercars or extreme track toys for even more larks. I decided to do Cult Legends to get the DS23 so that I could take a playlist photo of it. (In fact, I already had snaps of all the new cars because the game actually had them all spawning in races last week.) As for the c...

“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” How many mediocre reward cars have you got? The weekly in the 458 Italia went off without any problems. The HA was also easy money, although in the past couple of days, my connection in game has been less stable. Eventlab (1), Coast City Circuit , was another example of a well-built track with an absolutely dreadful layout with too many tight turns for this to be fun. Eventlab (2), Dancing Gopher , was a pretty decent scramble. One lap was enough, but it was all right. The placement of checkpoints ahead of corners was a bit disconcerting, but I can only guess the creator did that as a kind of marker for braking. Eventlab (3), Powerplant Surge v. 1.3 , was another sort of GTA 5 style circuit. Not too bad, but the props seemed a little patchy. Very good wheel spin afterwards. Doing the collectibles got me the Valkyrie AMR Pro. More about that below. As this is the first week of the series, it was time once again for Rivals. We had to drive the Va...