1.  Replace: “I really don’t need a brake at all, just a gas pedal and mad skills” with: “I need to brake before a turn so my car doesn’t end up in a ditch somewhere“.

Most arcade racing games teach you that a brake button is merely a piece of plastic on your controller you don’t use. Trust me, if you want to try a sim racer, and not hate the game at the first corner, learn to brake in a straight line. Most new racing games have some sort of suggested driving line you can activate. Do so, and make sure you follow what it says, if it’s turning red, you probably need to brake. You also have to apply the brake like you would in real life, which brings me to point 2:

2.  Replace: “I’m activated my NOS and turbo booooooooost!” with: “I’m gradually going to apply throttle until I reach full acceleration”

Nothing makes you slower in real life than a burnout, slapping your fat fingers down on the accelerator will do the same thing that your daily driver does when you floor it on snow. Since the cars you race in these games are 5-10 times more powerful than your real life automobile it takes less slippery conditions to make the car feel like it’s on a sheet of ice. If you learn to gently press the controls you will enjoy the game much more.

3.  Replace: “I’m going to floor it and grind this outside wall like Tony Hawk to get around this turn” with: “Must touch nothing, must go faster”

Colliding with anything is a major no-no in a sim racer. It generally slows you down to a halt ruins your car’s performance and in the case of some online sim racers causes you to get additionally punished by an automatically cut throttle. While you can slam into the back of someone else to assist your car in slowing down enough to take a sharp corner. You aren’t going to get very good at the game when you’re in first, when you don’t have any cars to slam into to slow down.

4.  Replace: “I go faster when I drift around a corner!” with: “If I accidentally drift out a little everyone behind me will pass me on the inside”

Unless you’re palying a drift mode or goofing off drifting is a bad idea. It looses tons of speed and control and takes incredible skill to master in a simulation racer. Just like in real life (go figure). We’re taught by most arcade racing games that doing “cool” things like drifting not only don’t penalize us, but reward us in some cases. Which brings me to the final mindset to change, and the biggest one:

5.  Replace: “Oh man, did you see me drift around that corner while activated my slo-mo turbo mode?” with: “Oh man did you see me take the corkscrew at Laguna Seca almost perfectly, I took 2 seconds off my lap record!”

The hardest part to enjoying a simulation racer is being able to submit to learning a new skill. Most arcade racers only reward split second timing, you only have to have a fast reaction time to succeed. In a sim racer you need that and you have to know when to accelerate, when to pass, when to slow down and try again another corner. It takes a while to get good at that. And you definitely need a strange definition of fun to enjoy the experience. To me carving the perfect corner is just as much fun to me as jumping accross the hoover dam while on fire through a t-rex as he explodes. And I accept that I’m weird. Are you?

I’m fully immersed in car-topia as I get that once in a while chance to fuse my inner gamer-nerd with my inner petrol-head. In fact I managed to resist the urge to rewind when I missed a corner bad while trying to overtake in my pimped out digital Cobalt (I know the irony of driving a simulation of my own car). Why did I not rewind this bad move and brake earlier? Because I wanted a reason to take a picture that makes the game seem more action packed than it is.

I’m loving how the achievements are doled out in the new Forza Motorsport. They flow freely as “rewards” for doing “things”. Nothing like Forza 2 in which the game gave achievements only when you did things that involved the words “all” or “every”, for example “Get all the cars in the game” or “Get a gold in every race”.

I’ve been thoroughly rewarded for doing fun things and it shows with how much time I’m putting into the game. The game insidiously tracks how much time you’ve spent racing and how much time you’ve spent in the menus. Which seems like the ratio should be astronomically tilted towards the racing time, but that’s ignoring how much time I will spend laboriously pimping out my cars with various stickers and tuning setups. I’m going to hazard the ratio of time spent in the drivers seat versus fiddling with the various extraneous bits will ultimately be 1:1.

Good bye, life.

Now, assume that I understand this viewpoint bias. And let’s talk about game difficulty.

I’m inspired to talk about this by this forum post I found on reddit. It’s a relatively well thought out post saying that games have become easier, but that it’s not a bad thing.Have games become easier?

Defining Hard

Games seem easier from my perspective, but is that really an absolute truth? I suppose we would need a concrete scale on which to determine difficulty. But the problem with defining a scale for difficulty is apparent once you try and discuss it with another person.

Difficult to one person is easy to another. Some games merely require a photographic memory to avoid obstacles, something I really don’t have. Other games need split second reactions, which I only have when a mouse is involved. There are those freaks out there that possess all the skills necessary to reduce any game to a pile of pulverized bits and pixels.

To me the difficulty of a game depends on how many different skills the game requires to make them easy to you. Crossing a grid that contains unseen traps that you must memorize is one kind of difficult. Crossing that same grid but requiring the player to play a music minigame while doing so makes it more difficult. Multitasking is the true difficulty.

A platformer can be made infinitely harder when you have to think several steps ahead. Those sections where you can’t stop are always the most challenging, because you can’t take them at your own pace. If you could slow things down to a crawl imagine just how good you could be at Super Mario Bros. 3. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, people already have videos of it. (Spoilers: they cheated)

To be totally honest, I was tempted, as I’m sure many of you are, to use number of deaths or lose screens to represent difficulty. The reasoning behind this is sound, an average of deaths would produce a compelling and official sounding difficulty rating. I only avoided it because that might make the scale based on frustration more than anything.

Next: Past to Present: Has difficulty changed?

Not an error that really bothered me. After all I personally knew one of the managers of the store, they seem a responsible and knowledgeable bunch (despite the looks I got asking for Layton as a grown adult). Not that I really think that any PS3 owner will be crushed when they find out this large box is lie. Frankly, they would only pick it up to argue about polygon count compared to GT5. Not that I think anything of any significance would happen due to this common error. I worked at Best Buy I know how many errors get made in ads across the country.

But I started to think about what this told me about the corporation that is Gamestop. Despite the fact that the store is run buy passionate gamers (at least a couple a store know what’s what) the store is ultimately owned by people who don’t give two craps about games. They don’t care if Modern Warfare 2 is a big hit or if it breaks the record for sales of a game. At least not in the sense that a true gamer would.

Gamestop Global Game Sellers Incorporated (I made that up) is looking for its cut of a profitable market.

What a shame.

How could a large chain like Gamestop not catch this error? By not caring.

I know the kind of nerds that run those stores, I hung out with them in high school. I talked shop with them every time I was dragged to the mall. I guarantee one of those employees caught this box, laughed at it just like I did and told someone above them who laughed and told the person above them. And it went up and up until it got to the person that didn’t laugh, they didn’t get it, they didn’t care.

“Will it affect sales?” he would have asked.

“Well…no…but”

“Then good, no problem at all,” and he would go back to counting money and stroking a sinister looking cat in his leather clad office.

It makes me think about my other games-based passion, board games. A long time ago, normal people played board games too. But ultimately only the mass marketable ones were sold in mega-sized toy-stores and interesting ones flourished in tiny, smelly, nerd huts that cater to Magic players and comic readers.

If you go to find a board game store that specializes in tabletop war games or designer games (eurogames) you’ll likely find a small personally owned store with someone behind the desk that has an opinion about all the games on the shelf, just like the guys behind the counter at Gamestop. he’ll have played all the important ones, just like the guys at Gamestop. And when an ad of his doesn’t look right he’ll pull it down and change it and he won’t tell the guy above him because he’s the top of the line, the guys at the Gamestop won’t.

Where are the small independent game stores? They must exist somewhere. Right?

They don’t near me, as best as I can tell. If I find one I know I’ll shop there. Even if Amazon has better prices, I’ll still gladly pay extra for atmosphere. Someone give me that option.

Maybe the thing missing here is time. It’s taken a long time for competent, passionate people to make stores devoted to things like collectible card games and comics. Maybe I just have to wait.

This week was particularly random, which is somewhat reflected in the show. Some weeks we’re all business in warm up and nothing of note happens. Usually that happens when we’ve done a bad job communicating before the show. This week however, we had already been aware of what everyone wanted to talk about so pre show discussions weren’t necessary.

I started the recorder 10mins before we started the show. No I didn’t edit this, it’s raw audio, we actually slide into the show with little warning normally.

I hadn’t noticed it before but those shitty suggestions were always there. Rhythm Heaven I get, but Yu-Gi-Oh!? On what basis would someone who likes the Korg DS-10, a complex piece of software that is the equivalent of a fully fleshed out synthesizer from the 80s/90s, like a childish property like Yu-Gi-Oh?

Two Yu-Gi games to boot, apparently someone really likes trance music and card games.

Well.Not literally, but figurative stealing is still a crime I suppose.

Let me backtrack. I was a Genesis supporter, stalwartly so. As much as I regret it today, I never owned an SNES. Which I now surmise is the greatest crime a self-proclaimed video game enthusiast can commit. If you didn’t play SNES games back in the day your weren’t playing the best.

It’s not as if I never played on an SNES. I did partake of my friends’ systems at times. But this precluded me from playing any RPGs back in the day (with the exception of Super Mario RPG, which my closest childhood friend and I completed in a 36 hour marathon one weekend). 

This means, however, that I missed out on playing one of the classics: Chrono Trigger. An experience I was determined to obtain later in life (read: high school) through the burgeoning mass of emulators at the time.But Chrono Trigger contained a portion of gameplay that required fancy graphics interpretation the emulators of the time were incapable of, which prevented me from progressing past the early stages of the game.

Luckily in my junior year at high school I managed to borrow a friend’s PSone (he had just bought a PS2) and got to play the PS version of Trigger, choppy opening anime and all. So for about a week straight,  while my friend was enjoying GTAIII on his brand new PS2 I was enjoying the 16bit splendor of Squaresoft’s masterpiece on his now defunct PSone.

So in the end I happily chugged through the ages legally, albeit through borrowing and not purchase, but the disconnect in never having the SNES version I’ve managed to steel my will and refuse the Square-Tax on the new Chrono Trigger DS.

 For now. 

I’ve just picked up a full copy of Carcassonne–several expansions to go along with it as well–and enjoyed the simple pleasure of organizing all the tiles, and meticulously punching them from their cardboard womb. I also snagged a 6 player copy of the seminal German board game Settlers of Catan, which easily transforms into the delightful drinking game “Drunkards of Catan” which was made more delightful when it easily came the closest to being the first board game to list as a cause of death on a birth certificate. I finally have my own version of Munchkin to trick people into playing and got to try some two player rounds of Chez Geek.

But the nerdery didn’t stop there.

I’ve been plugging away at Dead Space, Fable II and Little Big Planet. Dead Space was stopped, well, dead in it’s tracks around the end of chapter 2 mostly at the fault of Fable and LBP. I’ll be picking up where I left off and finishing that game, in fact, I made a pact with Tom that neither of us would take Fallout3 out of the shrink wrap until Dead Space was vanquished. The fear being that neither would return to such a wonderful game in the face of such a massive RPG (plus we both loved the original Fallouts).

I’d expected Little Big Planet to dominate not only my attention, but due to it’s easy to use tools, I expected my girlfriend would love to bounce through the levels with me.

Ironically I found a surprisingly different result. I spent a lot of Saturday in Albion, I was motoring through the story when my girlfriend arrived in the late afternoon. She watched for a while and asked if I had tried co-op yet. I was kind of amazed she was offering to try.

To understand my amazement you have to understand her gaming preferences. She likes The Sims, Time Crisis, Guitar Hero/Rock Band. She plays Starcraft and will play Unreal Tournament, but ultimately doesn’t care too much about action or RPG type games (except for her passing fascination with attempting to play WoW). I would hazard that she represents more average gamers than anyone on the podcast.

So I was shocked that a seemingly hardcore fantasy RPG would make her want to play. So shocked that I assumed she only wanted to play merely to participate in my obsession, doing something with me would be more interesting than watching my slave away as a lumberjack by my lonesome, even if the game wasn’t up her alley. As we played, though, a transformation occurred. She started to care that the gold she earned could be going to her own character. We went so far as to have her play through the childhood opening to have her very own hero to play.

As the night when on she commented on how she liked the game–that the game didn’t intimidate her, that it felt easy to get the hang of combat. Then she divulged that when I wasn’t around she could see firing up the Xbox to play through her character and hoped I would tag along with her, to return her favor. An interesting development to be sure.

So I was happy to see Adam Sessler’s latest “Sessler’s Soapbox” was devoted to how Fable II is a great starter game to get people interested in RPGs. I knew a game like LBP or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero could capture her attention. I was just shocked that there was such a phenomenon with Fable and that other people had noticed too!

This is the last car blog for a while, but it’s a doozy. Next summer when the gaming drought hits I won’t be sad at all. Because summer is when the autocross season starts. Basically I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but I have to say at the outset that if you have a decent auto or know a friend who does makes sure you try going around an autocross course or a road track at some point in your life. You’ll realize just how little you know about driving.

 First of all, here are the two courses I ran at my first event (I went to another one since).

 As is custom at the autocross club I went two, they run a technical course in the morning, then modify it to make it faster and run it backwards in the afternoon. When I showed up in the much talked about turbo Cobalt, expectations were high. Many people had read articles about how fast the car went around the Nurburgring and VIR. In fact, as I rolled into the pit I could hear people talking about the car.

“Did you hear about what cars that beat at VIR in…” they would say. Which was a great feeling, considering I had the cheapest car of the bunch. My class consisted of two BMWs and a Mazda MazdaSpeed3, to give you an idea of the caliber of cars there, let alone the fully modded 350Zs, Corvette Z06s and numerous Miatas.

I got a couple pics of the car from a photographer who takes shots of the competitors. Sadly, no one came with me, so I didn’t have someone looking for my car in particular. Luckily, the club is very welcoming and the guys with cameras make sure to get pictures of everything.

Yes, I have a printout attached to the side of my car instead of real numbers, and a big goofy R to point out that I was a novice. I ended up being ranked in the D-Stock Class instead of the rookie class, which was good for the rookies, as I pointed out on the podcast I might have had an edge on them from my “experience”.

The next event I returned with magnetic numbers in tow.

It’s important to not a couple things here: 1. No “R” on my car anymore, 2. I’m coming out of a hard left hander here, notice the chassis is level and all four wheels are down, 3. You can tell it’s out of a left handed corner because there are pointer cones on their side (I didn’t knock those over). Not shown in picture above: my big goofy-ass smile.

So what have I learned autocrossing?

Well, that it was a ton of fun. That I have a lot to learn…

And that it will shred your tires if you drive as hard as I do. Maybe I need some race rubber…