Baud Attitude

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.  🙂

OK, so a little more on Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, just because I got an achievement that was both insulting and strangely satisfying.

There’s a computer-controlled driver in Flatout UC named “Frank Malcov”.

Frank drives a big SUV, and he’s not a very good racer.  He never wins a race, as far as I can tell, and that’s not his purpose on the track.

Frank exists to be the bastard who, when he’s in third place and you’re in fourth, deliberately wreck himself AND you in order to stop you from catching up.  When I was just getting started with the game, I had a heck of a lot of 8th-and-lower place finishes as a result of old Frankie boy doing something mindbogglingly suicidal and aggrivating.

It is rare that I have actual hatred for an NPC, and I think that some credit is due the folks at Bugbear Entertainment for managing it.

Today I got the achievement “Frank Malcov Award”, which has the description of “Your driving makes Frank Malcov proud!”

There’s no other information, and there’s a fair amount of debate online as to what exactly counts for this achievement, but here’s my thought:

I got this directly after a race which I won by forcing the lead car into a wall just before the finish line, then driving head-on into another wall, which – while not on the track – was past the finish line.

So basically I think “Making Frank Malcov Proud” consists of being an absolute bastard to someone who’s about to win.

As previously noted, my poor Xbox 360 went off into the wild and scary world that is the Microsoft repair center in Texas, someone else’s poor, refurbished 360 was sent to me in its place and all should have been well again.

That is, it was mostly well again except for my XBLA titles, which were still tied to the last console.

Fortunately, it only took 17 minutes on the phone to get it straightened out, even though “getting it straightened out” just meant that they walked me through the license reassignment tool that you’re supposed to use when you BUY another 360, and which I don’t think you’re supposed to have to use when you have another 360 given to you by Microsoft.

This was good timing, since Xbox Live is down today – if I’d gotten the whacky urge to boot up Trigger Heart Exelica or Omega Five, I’d have been severely vexed.

Cripes, I played too much Everquest, I keep trying to type that word up there as “vxed”.

And now I’m consumed by the desire to say “keep trying to tipt that word up there as “vxed”.”

I need help.

Anyway, with my refurbished 360, I have been playing something a little out of character.

See, I have this good friend who keeps trying to get me hooked on two genres: Racing games, and tactical shooters.

This hasn’t worked out too well.  I did play through Rainbow Six: Vegas, but honestly that was helped considerably by the ability to put a snake cam under a door, target two or three bad guys, and tell my squad to go kill them all while I cowered in a corner.

Still, it was a good time spent blowing up stuff in Vegas, and I may even get the sequel once it drops to 20 bucks.

Racing games?  Not at all.  I’m not a Car Guy, so I don’t have the “cars-as-porn” thing going, and I have no clue about racing in Real Life, so there’s no attraction there.

I do occasionally buy hovercraft racing games – you know, Wipeout, F-Zero, even Extreme-G.  These have loud techno soundtracks and shiny graphics, which is all I really need for entertainment.

I play them a little bit and put them away.

The same goes for Daytona USA, which I’ve bought three times so far – on the Saturn when it was released, on the Saturn when they released Daytona CCE, and again on the Dreamcast.  I am Not Any Good at Daytona USA, but it’s a Sega-solidarity thing, really.

I’ve also got Ridge Racer for my PSP.  I don’t know WHY I have Ridge Racer for the PSP other than that it was the Game You Have To Buy With Your PSP, If You Already Have Lumines And Wipeout.  I’m going to blame it on Reiko Nagase.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find myself putting in “Flatout: Ultimate Carnage” as my “I don’t know what to do with myself, and I have a free half hour” game.

I’ve just unlocked the last three Cups in the Derby mode, which also unlocked a bunch of new cars, I’ve got $36000 in my virtual-car-spending-account, and if I didn’t have work in the morning, I’d be building myself a new set of wheels and getting down to some serious vehicular mayhem / racing.

Well, Microsoft gets reasonably good marks for turnaround time in supplying me with a “Certified Microsoft Replacement Xbox360 Console” to replace my sadly deceased console.  It arrived last night, happily encased in a plain, but well-padded box which I will be retaining for the eventual day when I have to send it back for another replacement.

Of course, I didn’t luck into a new, HDMI-enabled, quieter-fan & drive console.  The one I got back was actually about a month older than the one I sent in.

Oh, and also of course, Microsoft botched the license reassignments, so I can’t actually play any of my XBLA titles without being logged into Xbox Live, even after following their instructions to redownload them from the Marketplace download history.

This would be why I hate the idea of download services instead of having physical media.  I’m going to have to call Microsoft’s customer service and try to get it sorted out, and I’m really not looking forward to that.

At least I’m only in for about 50 bucks worth of XBLA stuff.  Space Giraffe, Geometry Wars, Trigger Heart Exelica, Omega Five, Boogie Bunnies, and Rez HD are the only things I’ve paid for – if I can’t get Undertow and Carcassone back, it won’t bother me all that much.

But they had best get me back my shooters, or, or, or…

well, I guess I’d have to pout at them, or something.

That’s no idle threat.