My Diaries

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

Thursday April 4, 2002

I Finish V-Rally 2 Again, Fairly Minimally

I'm sure I read somone else say what I'm about to say about V-Rally 2.

The only two cars you need to use are the Nissan Micra and the Audi Quattro.

I kept a reasonably complete log this time, so can verify my strategies and results. The log was on paper, not computer, so I can't right now share it directly with you but eventually maybe I will type it in!

The Nissan Micra seems to have a good combination of ease of driving speed, and handicap evaluation in the game. That is, the opponents go slower for the Nissan Micra than they do for, say, the Peugeot 106. It seems fairly easy to use it to win the first six events (all except the Expert events).

The Nissan has quite a hard time, however, in the Expert events, but if you have finished the World Trophy you will have unlocked the Audi Quattro. So the Audi Quattro is good to use for those. It demolishes the Trophy and Championship events, although the Expert Arcade event, with its tricky time limits, is a little harder.

But one thing I wanted to do in my game was finish with less than 10,000 points and not win the Peugeot 405 T16. The Nissan Micra helped with that because its is slow, but I wasted time when I could. For instance, in Championships you can completely throw all events after you have enough points to clinch it. (That is when the number of events remaining times 10 is less than the difference between your score and that of the second place AI car).

In fact, in the Expert Championship after I had finished 9 of 12 races and had a 40 point lead, I drove the remaining three races so slowly (about 12 minutes total each) that my time was well over the 72 minutes requires to show up in the Championship total time record. Although I won with 83 points to 61, my time registered as 59:59:59 even though it was over 72 minutes. The game actually gave me no performance points; when I checked the records for earlier individual rallies they had not registered either. It's possible the fact I had reloaded the series a couple of times caused the individual rally records to be lost, but I don't think I've seen that happen before. Oh well, that helped me easily finish the game with less than 10,000 points.

I had only 4021 points, and then got to 5977 after winning the Expert Trophy (I still threw a bit of time there, too, once I got a sufficient lead). I then entered the Expert Arcade with the Audi Quattro which can be difficult, but I was getting used to the tricky parts of the tracks and how to meet all the checkpoints. I was even able to win most of the rallies which helps since you get an extra "credit" or retry for every win. I took only one try to win with the Audi Quattro, using up only 2 or 3 credits (2 at Monte Carlo, and maybe 1 at Indonesia). I had then finished all 9 of 9 events and got 9 of 10 prize cars with 6749 points--a long way from the 10,000 necessary to win the Peugeot 405 T16.

After later redoing the Expert Championship, the World Championship and Arcade Level 1 I got 10006 points and won the Peugeot 405 T16.

And so, although I did a bit of fooling around trying to avoid getting the 10,000 points, this still indicates a quick way to finish V-Rally 2 once you have sufficiently mastered the courses. The important thing in all courses is to remember all the tricky bits and learn how to use the proper amount of minimal caution to get through them, and then try and go as fast as possible for the other parts.