My Diaries

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

Mon Feb 8, 1999

Passed IA-3,IA-5,IA-7 and IA-4

Well, apart from my chest cold, I had another pretty good Gran Turismo Weekend.

I got my bronze IA-3,IA-5,IA-7 and IA-4, in that order.

IA-3 (Grand Valley in a Griffith) was straight-forward. I tried a few times and passed by a slim margin. 2:02.986

So I decided to keep driving the same car, and it took a little longer to get IA-5 (Autumn Ring in a Griffith), but I passed by almost a full second, and there was a nice methodical feel to the progress towards passing, which I did by almost a full second. 1:23.061

In fact, I was so confident and comfortable with the course, that, since I had forgotten to save the passing replay, I tried a few more times until I got a 1:23.940 I could save. I didn't save the game/medal/days for that attempt, however.

After that I must have spent well over ten hours and hundreds of laps trying to meet the time limit on SSR11 in the Griffith. Whereas the required time was 2:14, I would typically (after warming up to get down from the 2:24 range) get 2:17.xxx, with 2:15.xxx not infrequent, and occasionally 2:14.xxx--at one point I got 2:14.016 Eventually I squeaked in with a 2:13.966

The replay of that attempt is not terribly pretty, containing a fair amount of wall-grazing. Turn 2 was clean, though, as was everything up to the underpass with the chicane. My tail clipped the wall on the deceptive corner going into there. After the long esse following the chicane come some twiddly corners. I clipped the wall on both parts of the initial esse. The run was clean after that, however; I got a really nice drift through the last tunnel. One sub-optimal point was that I exited the last hairpin tight, indicating I wasn't going fast enough, but on the plus side that meant I was ready for full acceleration really soon.

I then went pack to IA-4, the Viper at Deep Forest Racing Way, and passed with 1:23.829 after not too many attempts. (In all cases here, the pass criterion is the next even second).

When I drove my race-modified cars after this, did they ever feel different. Sort of like the whole car was rotating around a central ball-bearing or something.

The practice at SSR11 put me in good stead when I did the International series again. Although in one series I still lost it because I can still every now-and-then do something stupid at that barrier chicane in the underpass. As usual, the would-be winner stayed far enough back to guarantee me a win. I decided to use the monster '89 Skyline, winning both UKversusJapan and USversusJapan. I won a Honda del Sol LM; what a relief to not get another Cerbera. I wonder if the nationality of your car determines the nationality of the prize? But I'm sure I drove the Skyline before in the USversusJapan series, and I won a Viper that time, but a green Mitsubishi FTO this recent time.

I have a lot of work to do on Trial Mountain, IA-6, before I get to try the dreaded IA-8 final.

Also this weekend my wife rented two other driving games. "Nascar '99" and "Need for Speed III", both from Electronic Arts. Unfortunately I was in such a license-getting mindset that I really didn't get our moneysworth out of the rental. I did make about 2 hours of videotape, and will add reviews here when I have more time.

One thing I noted was that Need for Speed had fully configurable controls, but Nascar '99 gave you only a very limited selection. Controller configuration was less natural than either Gran Turismo or the earlier EA game "Andretti Racing". The strange thing is that Nascar '99 in many ways showed itself to have an Andretti Racing heritage. Most noticeable, the route map was nearly identical.

I don't understand why all games do not provide totally user customizable controls. As the adage goes, lots of things are simple with an extra level of indirection.

In theory the InterAct Barracuda 2 game controller allows you to map buttons to one another, but in practice it is not easy to do or to keep track of. It would probably be costly to implement, but it would be nice if the Barracuda 2 had an extra switch to allow you to keep several different sets of customized controls. On switch position would be the "non-customizable" position, to make it easy to always revert to the defaults. But, of course, you should not need customizable controllers, because the games should provide that facility for you. One problem with Gran Turismo is that it is not possible to reconfigure controls deep within a session. It would be nice if the entire "Options" menu were accessible from anywhere within the game. Then, for instance, you could switch two-player mode from "free" to a number of laps without exiting and re-entering the mode you were in. Other things, such as tire wear and handicap would be nice to change closer to the individual race, too. It would be nice to be able to store controller settings apart from the main game, too. Perhaps a fake car setting set could have been used for that purpose.

Getting back to the other games, I found Nascar '99 very similar to "Andretti Racing", but with significantly improved graphics. But there was one chicane at Watkins Glen you could not see coming at all because of the simulation, not really because of natural perspective. You had to brake entirely based on the markers beside the road. As with "Andretti Racing", it was quite easy, using the defaults, to win the oval courses, and seemed very difficult to be competitive at all on the road courses. The default settings appear to include a 125% horsepower setting (ie. 25% advantage) for you. Licensing is a sad thing when it causes a game called "Nascar '99" not to be able to include the Daytona track.

"Need for Speed III" seemed very difficult to play. The courses available all consisted of continuous curves, as opposed to straights and curves, and one felt little feedback as to what the correct speeds were for them. A lot of some courses were very difficult to make out because of the graphics. After the second or third time you could sort of remember "Oh yes, as I get close to that, I will be able to see that the correct road goes between what becomes two pillars while off to the side is an awful ditch trap", and things like that.

"Need for Speed III" has a subtitle "Hot Pursuit" which refers to an option where you can activate police cars to chase you to give you tickets. I don't really like this idea. Neither, apparently do Ferrari executives; you cannot drive the Ferrari cars in this mode. When the police do catch you and you get "fined" they do not seem to detain you for long enough to be realistic, and the game does not give you a picture of the ticket depicting the actual offense and location, etc. I am sure police boards across North America and the world must be up in arms (so as to speak) about this game.

In actual fact, I never tried to outrun the police cars. I never quite figured out at which spots they could trap your speed and detect an offense, but, all-in-all, I just didn't like the idea. One time I navigated the course at a speed of 15 to 20mph (trying to stick to below 50 outside the city and below 30 inside failed once for me as I guess they caught me decelerating after the 30mph sign), and did not get fined. At one interesting point they did stop one of the "traffic" cars, a silver pickup truck, and fine it. It seemed that it might be the case that before getting fined you always get stopped once by the police to receive a "warning" to stop speeding, whether or not you had. There was another point where your lane trickily moved to the right so that I managed the first time to get a "driving on the wrong side of a double yellow solid line" offense. But the time I drove at 15 to 20mph, I did not get stopped for impeding traffic. I finished the course with no fines. But at the time the "traffic" pickup truck was stopped, it was unclear whether I was being ordered to stop too, or what I should have done in the situation. The AI police do not communicate clearly to the user.

The extra traffic was nice; a school bus, some pickup trucks, and what looked like a red Volvo station wagon. (But was probably either something else, or something "generic"). It seemed that the occurrence of the traffic was such that you did not get a line-up behind you as you would when driving very slowly. When driving slowly, the scenery was quite nice, although the trees were nowhere near the quality of those in Gran Turismo. Similarly the buildings had more of a cartoon quality. Gran Turismo has such realistic-looking concrete and (static) shading and shadows. As far as racing action goes, I never really did an honest evaluation of "Need for Speed III", but in general it seemed quite difficult to match the computer opposition, even when I had a grossly outclassing car. And, at high speeds, all that nice scenery became artificially blurred. Sound effects were nice at slow speeds, too--dogs bark, cows mooing, church bells ringing and other authentic country sounds. I think they were there at high speeds, but less noticeable, just as they are in real life.