My Diaries

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

Mon Mar 1, 1999

Young Children and Gran Turismo

So last Saturday I stayed with my 7-year-old nephew and his younger brother and their father while their mother went shopping with my wife. The plan was for my nephew and I to play lots of Gran Turismo. Preferably, for my nephew to play a lot.

First plan, take my saved game with B license and Cr10000 and enter Sunday Cup, with me doing the two races and my nephew the High Speed Ring. Went flawlessly at first. He actually won at the High Speed Ring, no racing tires; I had bought but not installed the stabilizers. I'm not sure if I'd done any weight reduction or not.

So, we race a little more and get Cr35000, so I buy a Cerbera LM from my regular card and, oh dear, he really can't make use of all that extra power. So I demonstrate how you can use it to finish all three Sunday Cup races so far ahead all cars are still "Running..." before the next screen comes up. This gives me some more money to try plan B, and soup up the Supra a bit, definitely a bit of weight loss, racing tires and a racing exhaust, and I installed the stabilizers. That's it. No extra turbo. I remember when I was learning, the racing tires made the car seem impossible to lose control of. I tried the car out, and, I guess, I ran the Autumn Mini Ring (my nephew probably practised a couple of test run laps). But then the High Speed Ring comes, and he now can't keep control of this car either. Out of curiosity and young-type boredom he tried racing Grand Valley East as well. He used some interesting theory of running through the inside of the hairping to avoid the gravel. But, yes, he found the entire course very difficult and came last. And I was perplexed anyway because it did not seem that I could soup that car up to be a close to guaranteed winner for him.

We switched to trying to get blue dots in arcade mode. But that didn't really work, either. I ended up doing most of the racing and all of the winning. I actually left some A class for him at one point, but he told me to finish them up for us.

Actually, his main contribution was to persuade me to switch rather than fight, and stop trying to beat the '67 Corvette at Trial Mountain with a Mitsubishi GTO Twin-turbo. Sure enough, I managed to slide the '67 Corvette around to a win.

He actually ended up interested in the license tests. He thought the B-license final must be impossible after trying it, though. So I demonstrated a winning technique, squeaking in with .111 to spare after announcing in the esses that I was probably going to fail.

He sort of got into the start/stop tests, and even the cornering tests, but could not actually pass any of them. He actually managed to develop some technique of getting around the B-4 corner without using his brakes, or squealing his tires. I.e. he gradually decelerated with the throttle. It looked very tidy, but was about .5 seconds too slow. It's difficult to explain the concept of late braking.

At one point we had tried two-player arcade mode, but I don't know what the best way to do that is, without obviously throwing it. I suppose two-player mode might be able to demonstrate late braking, if we ever stayed together enough. I had realized that two-player mode would be a problem, but had not thought beyond that to a proper solution to the problem. Pick Eunos Roadster or something like that for myself seems like the best idea. I forget what car pairs we tried. I think "handicap" was set to "low", almost certainly I should have made it "high". Problem is you can't set the handicap to always be against one player. It's always against the leader, so if I do fall behind, I get help catching up too...

Anyway, sometime during the license tests my wife returned with her sister and a brand-new copy of "Crash Bandicoot 3", so no more Gran Turismo got played in that house that day.

On Sunday I played some more.

I'm still uncomfortable with Mitsubishi GTO twin turbo, and couldn't beat my own GVEii Time Trial with it.

I bought another mega memory card, and have recorded days 20 to 250 at 10 day intervals, to examine car stock.

I did license tests to run up the days. To keep track of which day I'm on, I flip through a 10-card "deck" of playing cards, just A to 10.

I got B in 16days (1&2 are the problems, a little trouble with 8). I got A in 61days.

After that picked a test to better for ten days, ending up with

I could not get gold on A-7 for some reason.

It looked like there always a Black Mica Supra and a High-Tech Two Tone Levin (white).

*But* I later observed that that that Levin went away on day 1610, coming back on 1620.

I never saw any '67 Corvette at the Chevy dealer.

I ran a fairly disastrous USvsJP with prize RX7 LM. I came 6th at Trial Mountain ii after losing it at the end while in 2nd. I was in contention at SSR11, but could not get it together.

I took my Celica 4wd to 4wd Championship. I did win the series, but with some help.

I had nice win at Trial Mountain ii, and a nice controlled win at Grand Valley i (You can always get back two first in the half-tunnel after the bridge). The competitors had split the points, so I only needed 2 points to win the series, and, indeed I got the required 5th place at SSR5ii--couldn't get enough speed out of car on that circuit, and so won 20 to 19.

Oh well, this was a nice consolation prize. When I first put that car together (trade value Cr99,960), it did not seem competitive at all, now I can win with it (as you can tell, it is not maxed).