My Diaries

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

Tue Apr 27, 1999

Thoughts About Acquiring Particular Prize Cars in International Series

Based on email to Dave.

Previously I never saw a black del Sol. Now I see them regularly.

If I take a "new" car, win UKvsJP three times in succession, I will nearly always win green Cerbera, red del Sol, black del Sol, in that order. After that, it will be stuck on green Cerberas.

It's like something "unlocks" a prize car to become available. The most recent ones appeared, I believe, when I used a tuned car to win USvsJP and UKvsJP. Varieties of cars might be LM(prize), race-mods and tuned. Perhaps it counts nationalities. I've used race-modded cars of all three nationalities to win the two appropriate series pf the three. Similarly, I've used the different nationality LM cars to win their appropriate series. Perhaps I won't get my fourth USvsUK and UKvsJP prize cars until I win with American and British tuned cars.

On the other hand, the green FTO was one of the early cars I won. But that is not the case with some people.

That suggests that the order in which prize cars become unlocked might be semi-random. Perhaps it depends upon the day number on which you complete various license tests, or perhaps the state of your "race trophy" collection.

Perhaps it depends upon a machine-readable serial number in your PlayStation.

Well, four successive wins with a new car in USvsJP isn't sufficient to win all four prize cars. Since the dreaded RX-7 Aspec LM is next up for GV300 evaluation, I raced it, which meant my results were less than perfect. Although I always won JPvsUS, I lost Trial Mountain ii a couple of times, and missed a couple of poles. I always won "cleanly" (ie with 4+ wins, and no reliance on shenanigans from other cars exchanging places).

I won, in order:

So, although I did recently win the white/green Viper, I did not win it in this set. But I did win a couple of green FTO LM's (sorry!).

And I did win the black FTO LM, which up until recently I had never seen. It now seems quite "common".

So I suspect when someone failed to win the green FTO LM, they probably got the game into a state where their set of three cars to win was {black FTO LM,white/blue Viper GTS-R,white/green Viper GTS-R}. This is strange.

Another thing, according to my notes, when I won the white/green Viper I did so when the tuned '95 GTO MR won the series 45 to 22. Now the points awarded to the second-place car is a difficult thing to control, especially with the way that Subaru zips off into the lead every time (although the MR can keep up; sub-theme of game; 4wd is superior). In fact, the '95 GTO MR career went:

Now, in general it seems that as you enter a series with the same car more and more times, fewer exchanges of points take place by the other competitors. So you eventually end up winning 45 to 30 all the time. Perhaps the car awarded depends upon the second place points total, although I have got both green FTO and white/blue Viper for 45 to 30. So perhaps there's a random aspect too. (vigorous handwaving). Not to mention the points that got me me first black FTO above, versus the green one. (And then there's the speculation that the assignment of prize cars to whatever triggers are involved differs from game to game for some reason).

Of course, the annoying thing about this is that someone somewhere must know how the cars are awarded!!! (I.e. programmers at Polyphony).

Deliberately arranging to make the second place car get 22 points or less would be quite difficult.