Occasional Tales

The treasure was obviously at the spaceport, where I roamed round and round, unable to pin down exact location because some Jeremy (Hunt – rhyming slang) was (deliberately) parked on top of the chest. This seems to be a new thing in the game to annoy players. I don’t appreciate having my time wasted like this. I had to do the Trial to get the Ferrari Dino because I didn’t want to buy it and end up with two, driving neither very much. My first attempt at the Trial did not go well. I tried an old favourite, the Renault Turbo 5, which just wasn’t up to the job, and quit before the end of the first race after the drivatars muscled back past me. I switched to the Celica for the second attempt. I was fifth on the human grid on Airfield and managed to claw my way to 5th to contribute to a team win. I was in second place at the start of Hokubu and finished in 2nd, somehow keeping up with the player who had comfortably won the first round. I’ll note that the car category was misleading. It sa...

I knew about where the treasure chest would be at the tip of the north-east peninsula. The weekly in the Ariel Nomad had me PB the golf course TB twice. For the CC race I did Yahikoyama and ran into a bug. On the big jump the nose of the car bounced upwards and it spun round on its rear wheels just as it pleased. I used a DS for the photo op., just missing a randomly stationary traffic car as I approached the jump. Mud, sweat and gears said “total buggies and off-road”. I thought “total” meant “anything goes”, but the game then said “unlimited” I ended up back in the Ariel Nomad. Poor labelling once again. If only PGG might employ a literate intern. The reward for Are ya winning, S1? was the Ariel Nomad, which ought to have been the reward for Mud, sweat and gears , and the Ford GT or something similar should have been the reward for this. I immediately suspected that Horizon Play (“three awesome air skills in a rally monster”) was forcing players to go CC racing because in those th...

The treasure is to be found in the far north-east of the map next to a chalet on a straight-ish bit of road. I wonder how many players ever go into the north of the map in free roam and how many only ever go there for a specific purpose. I mostly only ever pass through that region when I’m doing the Goliath. The weekly was in the Lancer Evo VI. Three laps of Sekibe got me into the top 10%. The SZ was annoying because you had to three-star it, not just get three stars across multiple attempts. I added another stupid phrase to my limited in-game vocabulary from taking a photo of a rally monster from the 2000s. B-class modern rally has reared its ugly head again in Stray from the Path , but this time in cross country races. Seriously? Who in their right mind would use a rally car in a CC race? But wait, dear reader, there’s more because I’d only just been doing Snow Forest and Oka yesterday. See below. Naruo CC struck me as being unreasonably wide. The Honda NSX-R GT was an absolute m...