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GTW Weekly Downshifts
Hi all, and welcome to yet another downshift which takes its name from an awesome but obscure song! (Seriously, there seems to be a pattern developing here; I might have to change it up next week. :D)
So there's quite a lot to go over this week, and not much time in which to cover it. As I've mentioned in the previous Downshift, I'm currently in the process of moving; in fact, I'm writing right now from my laptop at a Starbuck's in my destination city (I might get a mocha, in fact, because that coffee sure does smell good...). The process is going relatively smoothly, apart from the fact that I have no internet back home as yet and my PS3 has apparently decided that it would be fun to not output an HDMI signal to my TV, although that might be more a problem with the cable than the PlayStation itself.
Also, you'll notice in the activity feed on the main page that I've once again been very active around the wiki today. That's because we're currently testing an awesome new skin in preparation for the GT6 release coming up this holiday season. I've been busy adding links to it on the main page, creating a page that links to versions of the Stylish extension for Firefox and Chrome, and a few other things. (By the way, if you download it, don't forget to stop by here and tell us what you think of it!)
<randomness>Here's a picture of a 'Vette for no apparent reason. :D 500px </randomness>
Anyway! Enough about that. Just the other day (and by "the other day," I mean last week, the day before I left) I decided to have a few races at Daytona Superspeedway in Red Bulls, and with damage off, so that the racing would be even more frantic. We all know how crazy NASCAR racing at Daytona can be, right? Well, imagine that, but 100mph faster, and with cars that are much twitchier and more sensitive to steering input, AND with AI which always races as if it's the last lap and their tails are on fire (at least on superspeedways). Yeah, it was pretty crazy. Because of the fact that the cars are so freaking reactive, most races had at least one major spill. Once, a guy in a silver X2010 decided that it would be incredibly productive and safe to jerk the steering wheel quickly to the right and then hook a left (called a "Scandinavian Flick," a technique frequently used by rally drivers to upset the car's balance and provide and provide a better entry angle for hairpin turns) going into Turn 3 at the end of the back straight. He ended up skidding into the infield at 300mph, hitting an access road and flying for a few hundred feet before landing just in time to avoid hitting the inside wall. Another time, a guy did the same thing going into Turn 1 and wound up collecting four cars in the ensuing accident (including me, unfortunately).
But that's not the craziest thing that happened. No kidding, in one race I wound up in a tie. That's right, the race was a dead heat between me and a guy who had snuck up the inside during the run to the finish. And the thing was, the game ranked me second! On looking at it from Photo Mode, I saw that as the cars crossed the line, I was clearly ahead. If my PlayStation decides to work again, I'll make sure to try to upload a replay for you guys so you can see it.
So that's it for this week's Downshift! I hope you enjoyed it, and don't forget to tune in next week when we talk about potatoes!* Cheers, guys, and I hope to see you around the wiki!
--Gp75
*We're not actually going to talk about potatoes. :P
Just Updated
Welcome to this week's (not particularly) Testament-themed downshift! In case you're wondering, I'm referring to a particularly sweet song by an amzing thrash metal band that (apparently) nobody's ever heard of.
Anyway! So I've been a bit busy around the wiki lately, mainly touching up the main page by replacing the vastly outdated "Motorsports News" box with several motorsport-related RSS feeds. The advantages of these are twofold: one, they update automatically with all the latest news from the racing world; and two, we're not just limited to one or two items in a tiny little box in the right sidebar. While I was at it, I've placed a hard limit on the size of the activity feed (so it doesn't create a vast empty space to its left during times of high activity) and updated the "New at the Forums" widget to display all the latest activity on the new Forums.
But you didn't come here to watch me ramble on about technical stuff, did you? :D You came to watch me ramble on about whatever else comes to mind. In that case, I've got quite a few topics to chat about.
The first one is the fact that, over the next few weeks, I'll be moving. Even as I'm typing this, I'm in a hotel room in my destination city, here to look at a prospective place. That means that I probably won't be as active as I've been over the past few days, but I'll still be online most of the time.
"But GP!" I hear you say. "What about your latest gaming escapades?" Well, I'll be honest, I don't really have that much to say. Although I did find some time to enjoy a few minutes in this beast:
That's right, the Ferrari F2007! Man, do I like this car. It's (rather obviously) Ferrari's entry into the 2007 F1 World Championship, and it is insanely quick, especially around the bends. The first race I did in it was a short 25-lapper at Deep Forest Raceway, during which I trounced the competition by over a lap, although on watching the replay back I discovered that the AI racing was really quite good; in fact, if you're into excellent racing, I'd suggest a Ferrari F1 race at DFR. What I wouldn't suggest is an F1 race at Suzuka, because - and I swear I'm not making this up - literally every lap at Turn 15 at least one car (usually more) goes off and ends up pointed a$$-backwards at the Casino Triangle chicane which leads to the main straight. It's quite comical, really. I tried a 5-lap race at Suzuka, and the only cars to avoid losing it bigtime there were myself and second place.
So that's it! I hope you enjoyed this downshift as much as I did writing it. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go and listen to some Testament now. :) Cheers, guys, and I hope to see you around the wiki!
--Gp75
Hi there! Welcome to the first ever GTW Weekly Downshift. It's going to be a weekly blog where I prattle on at some length about whatever tickles my fancy; I guess you could say it's completely ripped off from partly inspired by Terronium-12's excellent Weekly Rewind over on GTPlanet.
So just the other day I was browsing my garage in GT5, and it hit me that I really have a lot of retro cars, mainly from Japan. I mean, I have a ton of them: a couple AE86s (including at least one Sichui Shinegeno Version), several NSXes from various generations, and around sixteen billion Mitsu 3000GTs/GTOs/whatever you want to call them. (Why on Earth do they keep showing up in my Used Car Dealership? Not that I mind, of course. :D) And then I happened on this seriously kickass image from Silnev on deviantART that just makes the good old Nissan R-32 GT-R look just incredible (okay...more incredible than it normally looks, because that is one seriously slick ride). Check it:
So you know what I did? I got another R-32 (in black, this time - my two others are silver and red), and I took that thing out for a ride on Special Stage Route 11. It didn't take long for a smile to come to my face. Yeah, there are a crap-ton of GT-Rs in the game, but damned if they aren't fun to drive! Seriously. The R-32 is just a blast to drive; I highly suggest buying one...or two...or 36. Preferably in real life. :D
And another thing about that drive: it was a bit nostalgic for me. I'm pretty sure I've been through those tunnels before, and over that bridge. There used to be a racing game series by the name of Tokyo Xtreme Racer. As far as I can tell, only around four copies of the games in the series were sold here in the States, and I have two of them. They were released for the PS2 way back in the day (around 2002-2003, I believe - don't quote me on that). I wound up with a copy each of TXR 3 and TXR Zero, and let me tell you, those games were insanely fun. They were, in a nutshell, a form of racing game/fighting game hybrid. You'd pull up to an opponent, flash them with your high beams to start a race (these were street racing games set on the highways in and around Tokyo at night - the game world for both of these games was categorically gigantic), and when it started, each car was given a health bar. The further you got ahead of your opponent, the faster the bar would deplete, and the first car to have its health bar deplete all the way lost, so races had no set distance; a pretty genius setup, all in all. So anyway, I'd gotten a fair distance into TXR Zero, and as far as I can recall my previous car had been a crappy little Subaru that I'd tuned the living beans out of to get it to be able to put up with the various bigger, faster cars. For the past few hours, I'd been trying to beat the area boss so that I could unlock another part of the map; the "area boss" was - and you'll never guess this - an R-32 GT-R. I challenged him knowing that the poor little Subaru, even as tuned as it was, wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the GT-R in a fair race. Somehow, though, within the first mile or two of the race, I'd managed to get the little thing out front. There was a long straight, and at any point I expected the GT-R to blow my doors off; it turned out, he had had an accident with a van, with he result that he was still behind when we got to a cloverleaf. Knowing that the Subaru was better at corners than the GT-R, I took it just in the nick of time. As I was a quarter of the way through it, I heard a crashing noise from behind, and from then on the GT-R was nowhere to be seen. On looking at the replay, it turned out that the GT-R had hit the water barrels where the cloverleaf's wall forked from the main highway and proceeded to get stuck on them for about 20 seconds before the AI driver realized it had hit the wall and backed up. By that time, I was so far ahead that there was no way he could have caught me before his life bar ran out, and I was rewarded with a brand new (old? Brand old? No, that makes no sense) R-32 GT-R.
But to be honest with you, that incident wasn't what entered my mind during that nostalgic drive in the black GT-R. The thing that entered my mind was: the R-32 GT-R must be an absolute beast in real life, because not only was it an incredibly fast car in TXR Zero, but it was also crazy fast (for a production car, at least) in GT5. Whatever the case, it was a nice trip down memory lane.
Anyway! I hope you enjoyed the first of hopefully many GTW Downshifts! I know it was certainly fun writing one. If the title rings a bell to you, then you officially know good music. And if it doesn't, then look up the title of the post on YouTube - you won't be disappointed. Cheers, guys, and I hope I see you around on the wiki!
--Gp75