FH5, Series 43, Week 4

I started the week with the weekly challenge in the ugly 1993 Ford SVT Cobra, a car that wouldn’t have looked sexy and desirable even back in the 90s. I’d seen there were problems with painting the body of the car, but, it seems, the dot on the tile wasn’t turning yellow to indicate completion, while the text at the bottom said the task had been completed. I did the race and the weekly was done.

I went to the Street Scene Festival site and smashed some cubes, which got me the 80% series car.

PR stunts. In the Cobra again, but this time C600. I one-shotted the danger sign and managed to front flip on landing. The SWS was one-third very good and two-thirds good, a most unusual outcome. It took a lot of attempts to do the Trailblazer. I know the best strategy, which is to head through the gate at a shallow angle, swing right through the trees (if you don’t go right enough, you’ll get savaged by the game’s feral logs), follow the road, and cut corners. I still have a theory that there’s a more direct, unmarked path through the trees, but I’ve never found it. The SWS was one-third very good. I managed to one-shot the drift zone for a rubbish SWS.

The neon tank is on the side of a house with some mint-green paint where the road points directly towards the church in San Sebastian. It’s out in the open on the main street.

Eventlab (1), Flow Ring. Flow? No. At least this was in daylight, but the wriggly bits were, I thought, too compressed, impeding the flow. It’s tricky to get such things right as I know from the Volcán Sprint ahead of the final hairpin towards the finish line. The surface was grey sand glued to chipboard. Ugh.

Eventlab (2), Ark Junction Spaghetti. Oh dear, there was an ominous name. Night race. Marks off. Use of props was excellent, but the layout was awful because there were points where referring to the mini-map was unhelpful, and places where it was easy to go off in the wrong direction. I may not know a vast range of racetracks, but they’re all overt loops. The SWS afterwards was rubbish.

Wreckage skills for the HA.

I one-shotted the HW PR stunt and got a one-third excellent SWS in the form of an 812 Superfast, which I sold (and afterwards found I have three anyway).

As for the RA PR stunt, I one-shotted and PB’ed it, expecting neither. One-third very good SWS.

The Trial was a trial. The main problem was connecting to a session. I’d join and about twenty or thirty seconds later, get disconnected, and rejoin. I eventually managed to enter a session, which is when I found that my B700 2019 Raptor wasn’t eligible. What?! My choices were the stock Deberti F-150 (B691; RWD. Eek!) or the stock F-150 Lightning (B607). I picked the former. I was on the front row for Las Granjas and managed a 4th. I looked away from the screen briefly and looked back to find the game had gone CTD. Bollocks!

Again, it took multiple attempts to join a new session, this time in a tuned F-150 Lightning. I was on the back row of Las Granjas with a team that was mostly in stock Debertis. As we went round a tightish right-hander where another player spun in front of me, creating a roadblock that I couldn’t get round without reversing. As it was also clear that the team was going to lose badly, I quit.

I returned some time later in the 2017 Raptor, which I’d built to a far better PWR than the Lightning…

Brief interruption because the forum try-hards have been claiming that off-road race tyres slow the Raptors down. Perhaps they’re right, but I noted no real issues myself.

Again, it took multiple attempts to join a session, and I note that there were no players in free roam. I finally started Las Granjas again. Front row, came 2nd. team win. The winner was in a 1986 F-150 that was suspiciously fast and came out of nowhere to take 1st. Perhaps it was legit. I was on the back row for the Airfield Cross Country and came 4th. I had a drivatar spin out in front of me, but was only briefly inconvenienced. Team win, job done.

And that’s it for series with novel content apart from the mysterious Realms. Hopefully we go back to normal length nights and races during the hours of nine to five.

Future series

I see the High Performance update won the popular vote. I was a little surprised, but as most of the Alfa Romeos and Lancias can be bought from the Autoshow, they’re already mostly accessible. I had a look back at the series and find that I have two or three (the Porsche Mission R) of most of the cars. The two exceptions are the Noble M600, which was the 80% reward car for winter, and the 2012 BMW M5, which is a summer event reward car. Neither have featured in the game again. The latter should be easy enough to acquire a second time, but the question is how they’re going to work the former into the series because the 80% reward these days is the Backstage Pass; or is the Noble going to be part of the Backstage vote? (Aside: this week’s choices are one pair of yawns vs. another pair of yawns.)

My current thinking is to do future playlist events with SWS’s as rewards (i.e., mostly PR stunts) because they’re random and I can sell any cars I might get, and do the Trial if it’s a series in which I never did the Trial.

I’m keen to see Series 5-10 return because the game claims I never did most of those. In fact, I’ve done every series, but those are the series which – bafflingly – never got saved. Well done, game; and I don’t expect FH6 will have the option for players to save the game locally.

The when of FH6

I’m still hoping for autumn this year because that’s the usual timing. However, the appearance of FH5 on Play Station could be a way to a.) extend the life of the revenue stream and b.) extend the life of the game (reasons given in MS’s order of precedence [You cynical old bastard. –ed.]) because FH6 is further away than anyone is expecting. (Well, it takes time to program in all the annoying bugs that detract from the playability of the game [I’m sure it’ll be well worth the wait; no, wait, I’m being delusional. – ed.])