Small progress is still progress

I started up Guitar Hero 2 so I could play me some Thunderhorse and Trogdor, and on a whim I decided to try to get further in Expert career. Somehow I managed to conjure up the stamina necessary to beat Freya on Expert (it must be the Diet Pepsi Max), got my 3 stars, 4-starred Last Child, and moved onto the next set, where I 4-starred Trippin' On A Hole In A Paper Heart and Jessica easily. Crazy On You is bullshit disguised as a song, and Rock This Town is incredibly overcharted.

So there I stand.

And I did this all with an ailing guitar controller in need of its third solder fix, and the inevitable hardwiring. I get dropped holds all the time through no fault of my own.

Shifting topics to a game I haven't been making progress in at all lately: Rumble Racing. Unlike Guitar Hero, where the most applicable reason for a slow rate of progress is me sucking, Rumble Racing is the exact opposite. I've beaten that game into the ground so much that my record lap times and overall times are almost impossible to beat, even by myself.

I don't usually get the chance to set record overall times, because the game only keeps track of them for three lap races and I usually run eight lap races, to give myself more chances at a record fast lap within a single race.

The AI is actually pretty decent. It's barely challenging on No Mercy, the highest difficulty, but it puts up one hell of a fight and uses the draft to great effect, meaning on most tracks you have to use powerups very intelligently to repel them. What makes the AI so easy to beat in spite of that is one simple fact: AI cars never launch powerups forwards, they only drop them behind the car. Then there are other tracks that, for whatever reason, you can just drive away from them. Part of it depends on the car you're using. I use Thor, which is basically a jet engine with wheels.

Thor is kinda hax since it has no drive wheels. It can go full speed through bumpy terrain where a vehicle with drive wheels will slow down as it bumps along. It doesn't lose speed in the air, and it can even turn in midair. A friend and I found that nothing else quite matches up to Thor in terms of overall speed, even though its handling is a little bad. Most people who use Thor for the first time are immediately overwhelmed by its rate of acceleration, which is much higher than all the other vehicles save for XXS-TOMCAT. That coupled with the slight lack of handling makes many people discount Thor as a useful vehicle.

Thor has sections of certain tracks that it's absolutely horrible on. Generally, long sweeping curves are its nemesis. An easy place to find some of those is the beginning of Over Easy. Thor comes into its prime once you reach the first shortcut and barrel on through the city section of the track. Over Easy is probably actually Thor's worst track, since the long sweeping curves make up much more of the lap time than the city section where it's strong.

A track Thor simply drives away from the competition on is, without a doubt, So Refined. The beginning of the lap has some curves that keep the AI near you, and to make things slightly worse you can only get one powerup with which to defend your position, but once you get into the second shortcut for the first time, it's all over. Being a railroad, this shortcut is extremely bumpy terrain, and if you read what I said about Thor, other vehicles, and bumpy terrain, you're going "ah, yes, that makes sense" right now.

Granted, I'm talking about Rumble Racing as though it's a very well-known game. Most people haven't heard of it, and even more people don't know that it's actually the sequel to (more like remake of) NASCAR Rumble on the PS1. Those who do know are begging for more, but it appears EA would rather play around with retarded DRM schemes on PC games (Spore) and make shitty sports games than turn their attention to a game that didn't sell well and do its fans justice with an awesome sequel.

People on GameFAQs come to the Rumble Racing board periodically and post threads asking "Is this game worth $9.99?" Sad that it's a bargain bin title, but when a game tanks after release, I guess it's what you get. To me, and many others, it was worth the $49.99 we paid for it brand new back in 2001. Simply because it's easy to pick up and get into, fun to play, and hard to master. This keeps you trying harder and harder, and before you know it you've been playing the game for seven years.

The number one complaint with the game other than the announcer is that the preset scores seem "manufactured", i.e. somebody just typed them in as opposed to them actually having been achieved through gameplay. Some fast laps in particular (Wild Kingdom and Circus Minimus) are much harder to beat than others. The preset stunt challenge scores are very competitive, especially on Wild Kingdom, where the top preset score is 600000 points ahead of the number 2 preset score. Regardless of all of that, all of the lap times, overall times, and stunt scores are beatable. I personally have beaten every one of them, and as far as I know, I'm the only one ever to beat the top stunt score on Wild Kingdom and the fast lap on Circus Minimus, even though I explain how to do both of those in my FAQ. Not enough people play the game seriously.

Speaking of my FAQ, I keep thinking I should update it, but then I realize that I have nothing new to add to it. I've already dissected and picked apart every possible aspect of the game, explained how to exploit the two powerup inventory to really screw over your opponents, and found a glitch on Touch and Go that I'm still not sure if it affects lap time at all because I haven't been able to hit it consistently lately, and I don't have the video capture equipment to make a proper video documentation of it. If it does affect lap time, it's not by much, because I've gotten within a second of my glitch fast lap without using the glitch, and I make mistakes all the fucking time on that track.

Maybe that's why I can't beat any of my fast laps: I make too many damn mistakes. What this entire post boils down to is "SUCK LESS".