Finished the Bucket List

I tripped the Bucket List Achievement last Thursday.  I’m not sure exactly when since I have pop-ups turned off in game.  I’d been closing in on it all week. I checked my stats before I called it quits for the night and saw the achievement had been awarded, but I was only at 98.5%.  I still had 4 events left on the Events List.  I finished those off Friday and Saturday afternoon. My stats show 100% complete 1532 victories out of 1796 races with 15183.87 miles driven over 177 h 13:01.

A lot of losses in there.  Some of the events I drove several times to get a win. Part of this was driving against Pro AI. I would start at Pro and only dialed it down if it was obvious I wasn’t going to be competitive, R1 & R2 usually, but sometimes a spec race would have the AI in a car I just couldn’t catch in the short sprints Turn 10 uses in the majority of the Event List. I also drove rewind off. If I could get through the first corner mostly damage free, I usually wouldn’t need rewind for the rest of the race anyway, so I just turned it off. This gives a nice credit bonus, but gets rid of the safety net for driving errors. I didn’t mind this so much, some of the best racing I had in FM4 was fighting back to the lead after an off. Even if it was clear I wasn’t going to podium, I usually would just finish out a race for the XP unless I was so damaged I had to pit. I did find out that in the World Championship you could still place first with a 2nd place finish in one heat if you won the other.

That’s going to be it for me and achievements in Forza 4.  I still have the Drifting and Kinect achievements left and no desire to go after either. If I’m sideways, I’m doing it wrong. To me drifting has as much to do with racing as figure skating has to do with hockey. When there is subjective scoring for an event it’s a performance art and not a sport. As for the Kinect, I had a Wii, hated gaming on it and sold it. I’m not buying a Kinect for the Xbox for all the reasons I hated the Wii. I don’t know anyone with one to borrow, so that achievements isn’t getting done either.

Sunday afternoon I had some time to play and wandered aimlessly through the menus a little before firing up one of my other gamertags and going through the World Tour.  I’ve got 2 other gamertags I’ve started through the World Tour when I was bored with the Event List on my main one. One drives only Japanese cars unless forced into something else and the other is American only with a more specific decision tree: 1965 Mustang > Other Mustang > Other Ford > Other USA > anything else. I’ve made it to level 30 and only had to drive a Corvette in one race otherwise it’s been all Ford. Sunday I got the Japanese driver up to level 20.

I guess I’m going to have to venture online, but I’m not to enthusiastic about putting up with lobby lockups, server outages and griefers.

Kitchen Sink Release including Jalopnik DLC

With the release of the January Jalopnik DLC Pack, I’ve got an updated Kitchen Sink, available here

This is a minor update primarily to include the new DLC.

1. Added Jalopnik January 2012 DLC Pack
2. Updated award levels notes in the car list to include Pre-Order and DLC cars that are offered as you level up. I played a different gamertag up through level 25 and saw a bunch of the DLC cars showing up as choices.
3. Somehow I’d missed the Mugen Integra Unicorn in the car list. I added it after the Turn 10 Christmas gifts went out.

Review the release notes for a complete list.

I hope the holidays were fun for everyone. I’m finally back at work after a couple weeks off. During that time I managed to get the Factory Driver Achievement with Mazdas. I had 3 or 4 makes around Level 20, but I own a 2003 Miata so Mazda was the easy choice once I decided to go for the achievement. I took a trio of Miatas, and a pair of Spirit-R unicorns and did every A class or lower event where they qualified. That still didn’t give me enough experience, so I took the Furai through R-Class events to polish off the achievement. That was about a week ago, since then I’ve been chipping away at the Bucket List and of this morning was sitting at 87% complete with around 13,000 miles driven.

I’m trying to complete the offline career before getting very involved with online racing. Problems with Turn 10’s servers is a big part of this. As I expected the servers were unreliable over the holidays. What I didn’t expect was they were shitty enough that even playing the offline races were being impacted by incredibly long wait times at the end of races while updates to the leaderboards either timed out or just took excessive amounts time to update.