For right now, I think I’m running
A race I know I’m gonna win
And I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing
I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

— I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing (Pet Shop Boys)

I’ve never sat down with a racing game with the intent of Finishing The Damn Thing.  I buy them occasionally, go a few rounds against CPU opponents, and hit the annoying point in the difficulty continuum where the game expects you to know a) how to brake, and b) how to finish races without crashing too much.

At that point, I usually lose a couple dozen races in a row and give it up.

Flatout Ultimate Carnage has been quite an exception in all regards.

It’s not that it doesn’t require occasional use of the brake, because it does, and I have reluctantly and begrudgingly learned how to occasionally let up on the gas pedal and even brake now and again in order to go around corners.

It’s also not that I’ve not lost, well, several dozen races in a row at times.  The sixth cup in Street Mode, for example, is straight-up broken in terms of difficulty.  It took me probably 6 hours of driving to beat that one damned cup.  (I then placed first in the seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth cups, so I think I am justified in bitching about #6)

But, it seems that I can deal with both of those frustrations as long as I get to do one simple thing:  Hit stuff.  Lots of stuff, including other cars, hazard cones, stacks of tires, panes of glass, gas pumps, traffic lights, stop signs, light posts, patio furniture, mall carts, uh… well, lots and lots of stuff.

And when you hit it, it all goes flying in magnificent fashion.  Of course, you’ve also got about a 50% chance of spinning wildly out of control.  More on that later.

That, it turns out, is enough to keep me going; that and a sheer bloody-mindedness that I have never before applied to any racing game and refuse to apply to any racing game in the future.

End result?  I beat Flatout mode tonight, getting a rather pathetic little cinema, an achievement telling me that I had, in fact,  beaten Flatout mode, and a considerable amount of satisfaction.

I never DID manage to beat two of the time trials in Flatout mode, I will admit, but it turns out that you don’t actually have to do the events.  They’re optional.  You just have to place in all of the cups.

If I’d known this in advance, it would have saved me an awful lot of frustration, particularly involving the “Pinegrove 3” track.

I have many unkind thoughts for the designer of this track.  I will not voice them here because, well, they are the kind of unkind thoughts that might seem justified and funny and hah hah hah right now, but if anything ever happened to the chap I wouldn’t want to have committed them to the web where humorless people might find them and ask humorless questions.

Ahem.

Pinegrove 3 and Street Cup #6 aside, Flatout mode was great fun.

I will admit, to address one common complaint I see online, that it takes a certain degree of suspension of disbelief to make it fun.

You have to put up with the fact that you can, at times, drive through telephone poles without slowing down… but, at other times, hitting an innocuous-looking scrap of plywood on the track will send you careening out of control, letting all the drivers you’ve been assidously blocking for the last lap zip past you and condemn you to a miserable finish instead of the glorious victory that was IN YOUR GRASP, DAMNIT, IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR THAT ONE GODDAMNED LITTLE BIT OF WOOD THAT YOU COULD BARELY EVEN SEE AND THAT CERTAINLY SHOULDN’T HAVE MADE YOU SKID INTO THE GODDAMNED WALL.

Again, ahem.

As I was saying, If you can let yourself get past the crazy physics engine when it is working against you, and just enjoy the crazy physics engine when it is making pretty showers of destruction, it is a heck of a ride.  🙂