Occasional Tales

Introduction Rather than bore you even more than usual with my activities in the game over the past couple of days, I thought I’d offer some commentary bordering on a review – at least of the game so far. Progression If I’d had the time, the gold wristband could’ve been unlocked in about two days. The progression from purple to gold was a bit grindy because having done all the races, I had to do a bunch of PR stunts which, as usual, irritated the hell out of me. Anyway, I’d got as far as the DZs when I unlocked the sprint to Legend Island this morning. Progression through the gold wristband is probably even grindier and may not be completable at this time (i.e., Evolving World stuff); or it’s down to the trivial content such as Horizon Promo or Stories or Roads etc. Road racing I’ve yet to do the Goliath and the Colossus , but most road races seem to be all right, although there’s nothing as far as I recall like Edinburgh Station Circuit or Plaza Circuit . So far I’ve not...

I’ve finally got to level 1,000 in Horizon Open and have the gold badge to prove it. (Also, as an aside, I’ve finally reached prestige 7.) It’s unlikely that outside of the Festival Playlist I’ll ever voluntarily bother with Horizon Open again. This session (which I undertook solely to get the gold badge once and for all) has been no better than the last occasion I played Open racing for a prolonged period. The cheater-exploiters, shovers, rammers, and Chinese e-sports players are all there waiting to ruin the experience, free to bugger up your race one way or another without let or hindrance or fear of any penalties. And then there’s tyre smoke. By all means have some for a touch of realism, but not enough to blind the player and give them enough lung cancer for seven generations. However, the biggest problem, I think, is the overall lack of adequate constraints. Apart from the race type and PI, the Cult of Anything Goes reigns unchallenged, which creates an utterly uneven playing fie...

I went back to the Ginetta to see whether I could do anything sensible with it. I tried building it to the top of A class because, I believed (deluded boy), it’d be drivable. No, the back end still wanted to be the front end, and wet conditions made it worse. I rebuilt the car to be all handling, but left it RWD. Same again. The back end kept wanting to step out, and rain and wet roads made it hopeless to drive, with me sliding across corners into walls. The solution – imperfect but it works – was to stretch out 1st gear to four units on the graph and have the other gears at one unit each (7-speed gearbox). As I said, this is an imperfect solution. I also found myself still having to be very careful through the corners by being somewhat slow and taking a wide line to prevent the car from spinning. The other part of the solution was to set up races so that they were dry. Many of the stock races are currently wet, which makes the G10 a nightmare to drive competently. I assume from specif...

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...

Marry, snog, kill? I mean, Yes, No, Maybe? The Automobili Pininfarina Battista is Tuning 3/9, front 48%, and has an SWS and a 100% XP bonus. No engine swaps, but doesn’t need it with the max. stock speed being 457kmh. Looks sexy, but is a chunky, plus-sized model underneath. I took it for a practice spin round the HW Goliath , but through the loop it went flying into the air, hitting the track above the crest on the far side. Back to my garage to slap aero on. 14:14 over three laps. Very fast, but hefty and only good for PR stunts in my view, or driving fast up and down the motorway because you feel like it. The Bentley Continental GT score 1/9 for tuning, front 55% (not as bad as I’d predicted), and has a 200% XP bonus. Not terrible out of the box, but really needs tunable gears. A rim swap gets you 30kg off this weighty British barge. I built it into S1 class. Fine, but not competitive. Drive round the map in it pretending to be a footballer. As I suspected, the Jaguar Project 8 is ...

I didn’t even have to wait for the fat lady to sing. In spite of having other things to do over the past few days, I’ve managed to complete enough of the Rally Ad­ven­ture to unlock the events on the Festival playlist and do them. It wasn’t quite the time-sucking grind I was expecting. And that feels like the end of the expansion. Yes, I’ll finish off the events that are specific to the other two teams (I’ve completed Apex Predators), but I’m in no rush to do them. Sierra Nueva is more rugged than the main map, but doesn’t really offer much that’s different. There are some mesas, and the roads (as I’ve noted already) are all corners. There’s a ruined church, but I assume that PGG were forbidden from adding Aztec and Mayan ruins to a fantasy map. The twisty roads lead me to observe (as others have already been doing) that there’s something about the physics. Normally, I pride myself in being able to take corners competently (which means no drifting or slam­ming into barriers; well, avoi...

 A fuss-free week. This was one of the least bothersome weeks in a long time. The drivatars managed not to be painful. The PR stunts weren’t exercises in frustration. The Eventlab tiles went live after I left my house. I got the 2020 Nissan GT-R for the second time, but because of the game’s unreliable save system, it’s the only one I have. I thought I’d do several races in it, but after three, my interest fizzled again. Like last week, it already feels like the week is over. The daily challenges remain, but will only have an impact on the series. The potentially annoying news was the wipe of the drift zone leader boards. Since I’ve had the game since Day 1, there’s a chance that some of my scores might get culled. It depends on when I three-starred the drift zones because by mid January 2022, I’d probably managed to three-star all of them. Since then, I’ve probably PB’ed a few, but as I don’t care for drifting, I may see some of my scores disappear. But so far, nothing’s happened...

But why do we need to know your name? I see that the f-word has a review of the book of the blog Girl with a one-track mind . I've been there a few times since Nanny unblocked blogspot, but I'm not a regular reader. I see from the blog that the identity of the author was revealed by those miserable, hypocritical shits from the Sunday Times. Why did they seem to think that the rest of us should know who the blog's author is? If she wanted to tell us her name, then I'm sure she would've. It's up to the blogger how much or how little they reveal about themselves.