My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Mon Jan 25, 1999

Spot Race Prize Money

Based on mail to Nick.

I did the experiment, and confirmed that, for the High Speed Ring,

Note that I waited later and later to lose, that's why the winning times get faster and I am closer in time to the winner for 4th than 2nd. I think.

I'm pretty sure the prize money is the same for all Spot Races.

Following pole time observations:

Never did deliberately lose the pole and see what times the winner got.

I won the Toyota Chaser LM edition. (Not difficult, but...) It has a strange burble in its acceleration. It doesn't seem to occur at a constant engine speed. Another thing I've noticed is that Vipers and Corvettes behave as if they have a first gear rev limiter limiting them to 6000rpm. But in the IA-2 test (SS R5 with a Viper) the exact properties of that apparent limit seemed to vary. Bah. IA-1 was fairly easy, but I've got a long way to go for IA-2.

In arcade I'm down to Deep Forest "B" as the only red dot remaining to get. I've switched to the Soarer in my attempts. I had been leaving Trial Mountain till last, but was getting so frustrated with Deep Forest that I went to try my luck at Trial Mountain. The Impreza won A after a few warm-up attempts. Next I tried the trusty Civic, and won C after two or three races. And then the Eclipse won B on my first attempt with it. I think Trial Mountain had seemed so hard at Normal that I'd learned where to squeeze speed out in the process. And there was the A-license test which helped set up for the hilly straight, too. The computer cars take completely the wrong line through the esses before the finish. I took advantage of so many sneaky tricks that my cornering onto the penultimate straight was still unpracticed enough that I often, even usually, ended up going on the grass. In addition to the final esses, and the turns before the uphill straight, another place one squeezes speed out of Trial Mountain is the first series of corners after the start. You start turning early into turn 1 (red/white rumble strip thing on your right side gives a big hint when), and can take that series of turns up to the tunnel really fast.

In fact, as general hint to driving Gran Turismo, many corners seem to be taken best if you start cornering as soon as you see the red-and-white rumble strip on the outside. And, even if one learns to do better, those strips make excellent reference points. But the perspective is such that some corners, e.g. turn 1 at Trial Mountain, (also the turn into the tunnel on Grand Valley East) do not visually seem relevant as early as they really are, and you can use the rumble strips to make up for that.

I just tracked down the FAQs.

E.g.

Lots of info there. Perhaps you knew that already...

Of course, I forgot to bookmark the pages that listed recommended cars for Arcade Mode Races, and am now having no luck getting altavista (or my memory) to find them

Hmm. Haven't today run across that guy who has his pages set up like Simulation Mode, either. Oh, I just did.

http://pages.prodigy.net/freakyfred/granturismo/

Hmm. Found a listing of Arcade mode class recommendations...

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~lrajlich/gt/arc_course.html

Unfortunately, I almost completely disagree with it.