FH6, Series 2, Week 2

I had to start with the seasonal On the Trail to get the GMC Syclone so that I could do the weekly. This was the start of me building cars which kept being the wrong year. Old person problems.

The weekly was all right, although spare me the Street Scene races.

I took a pic of a Jag from the 90s, and then went smashing bamboo, which got me the Crown Vic and the FE S-Cargo (following on from the FE MB 150E the other day).

I dealt with the Evolving World car meet and a picture there. I’m inclined to observe that they could remove the car meets in a future update, and no one would miss them. uox populi cum uocibus magnis uox omnium non est as they might have said in Latin.

Cosworth your Worth was my second attempt to use the wrong car even though it was eligible in all other respects. I ended up driving the 1995 Corvette ZR-1, which was another stock+ car (i.e., minimal scope for upgrading, and thus piss-poor handling). I wasn’t overly impressed by the inclusion of Soni, which is little more than a karting track.

The PR stunts all took multiple attempts to do, including yet another wrong car. I managed to do the DS in the stock Diablo after several attempts in other cars. I suspect that this PR stunt required a particular car (i.e., the Diablo) and that everything else probably falls short [Comedy? Well, don’t. –ed.] I thought the Diablo would also be good for the TB, but you had to use a B-class car, and the only one available was the Subaru Legacy. The ST was the same again. Oh, I thought, A class. Why couldn’t this be stated a little more blatantly? I completed this one with the Subaru STi 22B after fiddling with the build and attempting it several times. Traffic cars on dirt roads are a sodding unwelcome nuisance.

Another sodding unwelcome nuisance was another bout of Raku Raku, which sounds like some ghastly tropical ailment found in Asia. It’s certainly a ghastly ailment found in FH6.

I had some hopes for the Trial because I kept reading reports about how easy it was. Once again, I built the wrong sort of retro supercar, with the only game in town being the Lamborghini Diablo. However, I twice managed to understeer the car into a barrier in Tokyo in Rainbow Bridge, which prompted me to add aero to deal with the lack of adequate grip through corners. I eventually managed a 2nd in Rainbow Bridge, which was helped by two players quitting, and I managed a 3rd in Tokyo City Docks even though I was actually 4th. Possibly there was some sort of weird drivatar behaviour going on.

Clarity

At least twice last week there were events for which the instructions lacked clarity such as winning the head-to-head in the Eliminator or doing the Festival event in an 80s car. If anything, this is a recommendation for the retention of the forums, although some of the newer, rather vocal users were screaming that these were bugs etc. No, children, it’s a lack of explanatory power, which we also saw in FH5.

Rivals

I decided to start doing Rivals events. That began with the touge races. There are only five, but with six different classes of cars in the game, that meant a grind of 30 races, which presages a major amount of tedium to complete everything.

The touge races themselves were not a lot of fun. Up to A class, partly depending on the nature of the course, you were a little faster as you progressed; but for some of the wrigglier courses, the difference between the S1-, S2- and R-class times was negligible because there was little scope for hurling the car down the road to the next hairpin and so on without the risk of me doing something stupid.

I’ve also had a thought about doing Rivals in lower-specced cars because on the first occasion, I don’t need to strain myself to beat the times. It means if one of the dailies is to win a Rivals event, I don’t have to worry about improving my time too much.

Horizon Promo

Having started on Rivals, I then got distracted by Horizon Promo and trying to work out ways to provoke various missing cars out into the open. One strategy seems to be to choose a car from the same manufacturer in the same class as the stock car. I ended up buying several cars from the Autoshow to fill in gaps, but I’m a long way from rolling in lolly to be casually haemorrhaging it on cars. It’s also revealing which cars, I assume, are locked behind wheel spins. I also have a sneaking suspicion that you may have to drive the Limo to get a snap of it, and the same was true in FH5 because the drivatars don’t appear to use it voluntarily. I managed to unlock the SWS and got another Subaru (repeat screening? I can’t tell these days because we can’t sell duplicates from wheel spins).

Road layout, OR The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection

In FH5 the plane wing seemed to be a common layout feature (long straight, sharpish turn, short straight, sharper turn). In FH6 a frequent, rather noticeable pattern is for the road going into and coming out of the turn at about the same angle with a short curve in between regardless of the actual shape of the terrain.