FNG 8/23/2008

Thundr, Tsam and I joined up tonight to finally try out the "Missions" server talked about on the front page news when first entering TrackMania United.

It's a French server that contains tracks that have some sort of mission objectives to them. These range from quizzes (where the direction you take in a fork-in-the-road determines your answer to a question... if correct, you continue through a checkpoint and get to move on... if you answer incorectly, you get to turn around and go back or respawn from the last checkpoint...) to full blown missions broken into parts with an objective for each part (take out the spy, paint the target for an air strike, etc.) to tracks with an RC car view (I so miss those from Nations) and multiple paths. One included snagging Christmas gifts for the family while driving along to a Christmas song.

The thing that lured us to the server is the fact that it hosts all of Crusard's Tracks (except Trump Card II, yet...) - but we did get to try The Trump Card (original) tonight, and it ROCKED! Among Crusard's others we tried tonight are some he created for TrackMania Nations that include "The Bobsleigh Challenge", a claustrophobic wall-ride extravaganza (that, while a frame-rate killer, is quite fun) and "MicroMachines" (an RC-style track with some fun jumps and multiple paths.)

The maps were very challenging and there were some fun racers to race with tonight.

If you get a chance... find the MISSIONS server:
* Play Online
* Select "All"
... do ...
* France
* Aquitaine
* Gironde
* MISSIONS
... or ...
* Select the magnifying glass (Search)
* Type: MISSIONS (it's case-insensitive)
* Select "Search"

Once in... add it to your favorites so you can get to it faster next time. It's the worth the visit... and we didn't experience lag much. Thundr did around 1:00am and bailed... and as mentioned before the Boblseigh track was a FPS killer, but not enough to be unplayable.

Enjoy! Hopefully we'll see you there sometime.