TieMania - Epic Buzzer Wins for ThatOneGuy and Thundr on TrackMania

Both ThatOneGuy and Thundr cross the finish line at the buzzer, Thundr a millisecond or two behind ThatOneGuy... both with the exact same time for the lap.  Epic finish to an epic race.
Too bad Thundr always follows the lightning!!!  ;)

Tonight was a TrackMania night for ThatOneGuy, Thundr and Atholon.  You might call it an "Island Vacation", as the night was dominated with Island tracks.  And there was much rejoicing.

Atholon knocked off before the TrapMania tracks started cycling on the server. 

One of them was a very short track with a sharp 90-degree turn at the beginning, coming straight off turbo pads, followed by an unnatural chicane right after, then another quick/wide 90.  Get past that and you're met with a short jump to a piece of road with a column right-in-the-middle, then a high loop to the finish line.

It was taking us 20-30 seconds to finish a run at first... but by the time the Time Attack timer was about to finish, Thundr and I were racing to finish our last laps; both trying our best to beat that last sliver of a second.

Literally at the buzzer, I fly through the gate only to see Thundr flying through milliseconds after.  I bring up the scores and we both have the exact same time.  Immediately after, the podium screen appeared.  Because I got the time first, I kept the first place.

It was, hands-down, one of the most epic races in FNG history.

GG, Thundr!  Next time man, next time...

Hot Pursuit - Thursday Night Gaming Edition

"Santa" dropped a special gift in Atholon's Steam account this morning and helped him join the other FNGers playing Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

We "gave it a spin" tonight with Thundr, who got his settings worked out so he can play with us too.

The first several runs found myself trying to bust both Thundr and Atholon, and while I came close a few times, was never successful.

Then we switched to me running from them as a lone racer... and you guessed it, couldn't get away.  It was fun though, so we all started taking turns being the lone racer, on a quest to be the first one to evade the cops and win the race.

I was finally victorious on one run where I missed what we thought was a shortcut... Atholon attempted the shortcut only to find it was a dead-end.  Thundr ended up with a fatal crash that took him out of the race as they tried to catch up with me.  A few miles later, the finish line was finally in sight.  I checked my radar and saw Atholon quickly approaching; but it was too late.

Victory ahead!

First lone racer victory of the night.

Our final race had Thundr and myself chasing Atholon.  Thundr unfortunately wrecked out of the race, and it left me tailing Atholon for the next 5 miles.  Those 5 miles had us careening through the streets, myself ramming Atholon's car as often as possible, and Atholon hitting the brakes and letting me fly on by as often as possible.

It came down to the wire, and we thought there would be a 2nd lone racer victory for the night; but I finally got that last bash in... cops win.

Here is a shot Thundr took just before the bust, and one I took of the wreck when the bust occured:

Take that punk racer!!!

So close... yet so crashed... BUSTED!

It goes without saying that we had a good time... did I mention this game FREAKING ROCKS?!

I'm also happy to report that we had no connectivity issues as far as getting gamers into the lobby was concerned.  Jarin had one drop out of the game, but it was due to alt-tabbing out to capture the screenshot you see above... now we just need to get eight of us together at once instead of little 2's and 3's here-and-there.

Hopefully that'll happen soon...
GG!

Gaming Week Continues with Burnout and Hot Pursuit

I happened to catch SpeedMonger on IM tonight, so we decided to test some of our connectivity issues.  

We have previously had problems with Split/Second and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.  Earlier in the week, when we had our problems with Hot Pursuit, one of my computers was able to connect, so I checked my router settings to see if I'd maybe been forwarding some ports to that computer for another game that might be interfering with ports Hot Pursuit uses.

I found that I'd been forwarding Titan Quest ports to that machine, so I assume it was the cause of our dilemma the other night.  I turned the port forwarding off for that game, and we commenced testing out Burnout Paradise first.

We connected fine and spent an hour free roaming and taking each other down, as well as trying out some of the events in the game.  It was a good time.  Some of the most memorable moments of the night were us trying to get the biggest drift in free mode inside a stunt quarry.  We were constantly attempting to take each other down to stop the drift, and SpeedMonger was successful in stopping me several times.

He helped me figure out the correct jump to take to get a hard to reach billboard in the quarry, and despite doubts that my piece-of-crap car (third one you earn) could make the length of the jump to reach the billboard, we were able to barely crash through it (and epic wreck afterward.)

SpeedMonger is only missing 8 billboards before he has them all, and one of the events we played brought us to the parking garage that has the launch ramp necessary to reach the billboard. After we figured out which ramp we had to take, we both started trying to make the jump onto a building's roof across the road, required to launch through the billboard in question.

Below is the the screenshot of the scene where the billboard is.  I was first to break it, so I pulled my car next to the fragments (bottom-right of the screenshot.)  The billboard was on the edge of the canopy roof you see on the building to the right of my car.  In the distance is SpeedMonger (JCA69 on EA games) attempting to make the jump to the roof.

SpeedMonger jumping for the roof to take out the same billboard
you see lying broken in front of me.

We tried Hot Pursuit next and were successful in connecting to each other!  Since there were only 2 of us, we ran 3 Interceptor courses: SpeedMonger racer and myself as cop first, then 2 more vice-versa.  We had a blast (literally - EMP anyone?!) and I look forward to getting SpeedMonger in on some games with more players in the future, hopefully.

If only I could transform into Bumble Bee and take out the cop car chasing me...

More Hot Pursuit Fun

DirtyDan, about to be busted by WhollyMindless and Freyar.
(Click to enlarge)
Besides the two cops closing in on him,
notice the helicopter (under the yellow health bar)
ahead ready to drop a spike strip on him!

Well, I have mixed feelings about tonight's Hot Pursuit action... the action was great, don't get me wrong, but getting the action started was a hassle again tonight.

We had a different mix of players tonight... three that we hadn't connected with before:

• ThatOneGuy
• DirtyDan
• WhollyMindless
• Freyar
• Dragonflye

Like the other night when we couldn't get all of us connected in one game, and we found out that the mix of SpeedMonger and myself and/or Mando was the brutal combination... tonight it was Dragonflye and WhollyMindless.  *sigh*

I hope whatever network weirdness is going on with the game's seemingly "auto-resolving" will get worked out by Criterion/DICE or whoever was responsible for the networking code.  I'd rather do some port forwarding or something if it would let us all connect fine.  Hopefully we'll find a new patch or workaround soon so we can all play together.

Dragonflye gave up and dropped out for the night, and the other four of us were able to connect fine and race for a while.  We switched off for 2v2 Hot Pursuits, with the teams being DirtyDan and myself, vs. WhollyMindless and Freyar.  We took turns being cops and racers, swapping each round.

We had a ball and I was bummed when I had to bail for the night... but the picture you see above was of the final moments of the final pursuit.  I'd been taken out early in the game by WhollyMindless, who placed a roadblock in just the right spot to ram me into and totally sandwich me in, preventing me from backing out before the "busted" timer removed me from the game.

This left a lot of time for Wholly to catch up with Freyar and use the outnumbering advantage on DirtyDan.  I got to spectate the whole thing and witness the intense conclusion you see in the screenshot above.

One of the cops had called in a helicopter, while the two closed in on Dan.  You'll notice that Dan and Freyar were both in "Critical Damage" mode where either could have been removed from play with one more good hit to their vehicle.  Unfortunately for DirtyDan, he was the recipient of the final blow.

Once we got playing, the action was good, with rare little spots of lag.  Again, we hope we can figure what's causing some of us to not network nice together, so we can get a full game going and all enjoy this great game.

Thanks to WhollyMindless and Freyar for joining with us tonight.  We had a great time and hope they'll join us again for more FNG Hot Pursuit sessions... (TrackMania too!)

GG!

Hot Pursuit - Quickly becoming a new FNG staple

(click to enlarge)
Check out the Mumble overlay near the top-right corner.
Yes, that's my THT1GUY license plate next to my alias!  :)

Well, Christmas night was a blast.  And while Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit isn't without glitches, it's a pretty dang nice experience for the most part.

We had six people show:

• SpeedMonger
• BomaJoe
• DirtyDan
• ThatOneGuy
• d6Amefath3r
• Mando

We were hoping we could get all of us into a game, but for some reason SpeedMonger has a problem connecting to ThatOneGuy, but only with certain computers from my home.  As mentioned before, my two kids joined us, and for some reason, d6Amefath3r could join SpeedMonger and BomaJoe and play a few rounds, but anytime Mando or myself joined with them, if SpeedMonger was in the game, we couldn't join, and vice versa.  d6Amefath3r was having problems with the game crashing to the desktop with no error randomly too.

So we split into two games and had a riot for a while.  SpeedMonger opted to jump out and the five left joined together for some fun mayhem.  We played a bunch of Hot Pursuit matches, taking turns being cops and racers. (Being a cop is harder than it sounds...)

Hot Pursuit involves cops trying to stop the racers during a race they're having along the Seacrest County roadways.  If the racers reach the finish, they win.  If the cops shutdown the race by taking the racers out, the cops win.  It was definitely interesting trying to stop the racers as a cop, and exciting trying to finish the race with the "po-po" on your tail.

After midnight, I excused my children to bed, and BomaJoe excused himself; which left DirtyD and I to our lonesome.

We decided to try another mode, Interceptor, which was a perfect choice because it's meant for one vs. one (Cop vs. Racer.)

This mode is interesting, in that it plays more like Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  The cop chases the racer until they are able to take the racer out; or the racer evades the cop until they can get out of its range and go through a 30-second "cool down" timer.  It's more of a free-roam mode where you're not locked into a given way to go on the track, like Hot Pursuit.

DirtyDan and I found each other pulling a lot of handbrake 180's, trying to evade each other, and have some really funny moments I wish I'd FRAPSed some screenshots or video of.  One of the funniest moves of the night landed me one of our first "escapes" in Interceptor mode.  

DirtyDan had about exhausted his supplies of helicopters, EMPs and Roadblocks (still had some spike strips),  on this track that was nighttime and raining.  On his last attempt at unleashing the fury of his EMP shockwave on me, I used the first of my "Jammers" to stop the shockwave and disable his radar.  I can't remember, but I might have dropped a spike strip myself at that point to help slow him down too.

I then immediately kicked in my Turbo to try for a speedy getaway. In the meantime, I'd wait for one radar jammer to finish, then immediately launch another; and continued this until I'd exhausted them all... which gave me enough time to evade DirtyDan far enough to get my cool down and complete it.

We shared some good laughs over that and other fun rounds of Interceptor.

---

Thundr received his copy of Hot Pursuit on Monday, so he and I hooked up for a little more mayhem (in more than one sense of the word.)

Thundr's system unfortunately fits the mold of the minimum requirements for the game; and they proved to act like sub-minimum requirements.  Thundr had some trouble getting connected initially, but it seemed to work itself out for 5-6 Interceptor rounds.  Then it seemed to kick him out of every game after that.

One aspect of the game I forgot to mention is the Autolog.  It keeps track of the top scores of your friends in the different events throughout the career modes.  While Thundr was making tweaks, I'd periodically go back to some of the career modes and run a round or two, and was able to successfully claim #1 spots on some events, or raise my standing on the "Speedwall."  That will add some extra fun to the game when we can't be online playing each other.

---

Anyway, if you don't have it... snag it.  If your computer won't handle it, upgrade it!  :)  I think this game's going to stay for a while, and we'd love to have you join us.

Hopefully we can work out whatever kinks we've experienced so far (or that EA/Criterion will and give us a patch) so we can all enjoy the game to its fullest potential.

Happy New Year!

Split/Second Mayhem

Atholon, Thundr and myself played tonight in some grueling matches of Split/Second.

The starts of the races are hilarious, because whoever is in last place when Thundr is playing, gets shoved back by the other cars due to a game glitch that we believe has to do with load times and how fast/slow one connects to the race.  I'll be sure to capture the shove-back phenomenon with FRAPS next time we play, it's pretty funny; and gives everyone else a 10-20 second handicap, for the win!

We played several rounds of Survival, including an epic run where I was able to pass 10 trucks before a wreck, then another 11 during the end of the round and sudden death.

Keep those multipliers comin'!!!

After that we ran several races, racing nearly every track before it was time for us to start dropping off for the night.

We had a great time, and hope we can get more FNGers to join us so we can get a full game of humans and see what kind of explosive mayhem we can cause then.  Join us will you not?!

And don't forget to score Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit... we're planning some epic Cops and Racers fun on Christmas night!

Mistral and Varsity - Two FNG TrackMania author faves; and MCM2 on Windows 7 a reality?

Thundr, Beuchety and I raced tonight on the Mistral World Selection server.  

DirtyDan, Thundr and I had played that server last week with about 50 other people and had a ball!  Even the server host (and excellent track author) raced with us that night.  We had so much fun we had to run it again this week.  The server had less than 10 people for most of the time, but they were cool racers and we didn't have any repeats of the tracks from last week.  All were fresh and fun.  

We snagged from TMX a Mistral track called "On the Edge" that we couldn't finish during our first round playing it, but are looking forward to playing it more with FNGers (Thundr spent a few while I was crafting this email and finished the track.)

When I looked through my browser tabs to see the other tracks I'd queued for download after our session (there were four of them) ... I discovered that two of them were from the same author; named Varsity.

We enjoyed Varsity's tracks so much tonight, that we downloaded the two we played, then found two more on TMX that were his highest awarded tracks.  I'm thinking we should put up our own server next Friday and run those (among others we've newly downloaded.  Some would make great tournament material.

So join us next Friday for some fast/frantic Mistral and Varsity tracks.

-------------------------

In other most excellent news.  I figured out a way to get Motocross Madness 2 to run for those that have Windows 7 machines that will only do Software Rasterization in MCM2.

The problem is, it requires an XP license.  :)

VMware has released a new version of their free Player software that does two very important things:

1. Supports DirectX 9.0c with a virtual 3D adapter.

2. Allows you to create your own Virtual Machines.

I tested on my i7 laptop (ATi Radeon 5870, 8GB RAM) by creating a Windows XP VM, installing MCM2 and played at 1920x1080 @ 30fps!

Note, there are still some visual anomalies in the menus, but we were all getting those in XP as well, so we'll suffer through them.

I would like other FNGers to please try this, if you have an XP license to spare on a VM and see if you get the same mileage out of this solution.  This may very well help us bring MCM2 back into FNG play!

Turkey Bowl 2009 Results

Final Standings

1. ThatOneGuy (Jeff Litster) - 300 pts
2. DirtyDan (Dan Wetzel) - 221 pts
3. d6Amefath3r (Brennan Litster) - 193 pts
4. angus4ever (Roger Douglass) - 149 pts
5. SpeedMonger (Chance Allen) - 145 pts
6. bomajoe (Joe Hargadon) - 144 pts
7. thundr (Jarin Blackham) - 117 pts
8. beuchety (Tyler Beuchert) - 80 pts
9. BigBadMrT (Mark Thompson) - 55 pts
10. Mando (Mandi Litster) - 41 pts
11. atholon (Walt Weidner) - 39 pts

Recap

Without a doubt, this year's Turkey Bowl was our biggest and most successful Turkey Bowl ever. I really hope it will set a precedence for future Turkey Bowls.

This year, sadly, we had to shelf Motocross Madness 2 (MCM2) due to incompatibilities with Vista and Windows 7 for many FNGers. Fortunately we had TrackMania United Forever as an excellent alternate. We raced 15 of the highest ranked tracks on TM Exchange (TMX); 2 from each environment (except Island which had 3.)

Bomajoe said the tracks were "challenging, yet doable"; and FNGers found it necessary to practice the track pack before the tournament in order to do well.

We had 11 gamers in the tournament, and the only glitch we ran into was when Atholon's internet connection failed just before the tournament began. I ended up hosting the server on my measly 6Mbit/700k internet connection, hosting 4 of the players in my own home and the rest online. No one lagged and everyone stayed connected (well, with the exception of Chance who kept tweaking his control settings, heh.)

We welcomed many newer FNGers this time around... angus4ever, bomajoe, and SpeedMonger; who proved forces to be reckoned with, taking 4th, 5th and 6th places. My daughter, Mando, also made her first official FNG appearance. We hope to see more of them in the future!

The competition was exciting; especially with 4th, 5th and 6th place being within 8 points of each other. SpeedMonger barely claimed 5th place from bomajoe besting him by a single point. I was fortunate enough to "bowl a perfect game", despite a few close calls on a couple of the tracks.

Atholon gets special mention for "keyboard powa" and "paired driving" as he was assisted by his beautiful fiancee, Kris10. The two will be married next month... congratulations y'all!

Congrats to the FNGers on the podium after the tourament: ThatOneGuy brought home the Gold, DirtyDan the Silver and my son, d6Amefath3r won Bronze.

I hope everyone had a great time, and again, I appreciate all the support everyone has given me over the past seven years of Turkey Bowls... they've certainly seen their share of problems! But the number seven must really be lucky, because this one went off without a hitch. Here's to the next seven Turkey Bowls!

For detailed race results, see the recap on the Official FNG website.

Biggest FNG Night in a Long Time - TrackMania Rides Again!

There's nothing in the world like seeing the sight to the right. 3 gamers besides myself in TrackMania United Forever.

And that was just the beginning. This past Friday we had 8 TrackManiacs show up, including 4 new FNGers that we'd like to introduce:
Kristen Yates - FNG_Kris10
Chance Allen - SpeedMonger
Johannes Gappmaier - jgappm
Roger Douglass - angus4ever

Added to the mix were:
Jarin Blackham - FNG_Thundr
Jeff Litster - FNG_ThatOneGuy
Walt Weidner - FNG_atholon
Dan Wetzel - FNG_DirtyDan

It was a ton of fun, and we look forward to lots more of the same in the future.

What is even better, is that the fun doesn't stop online, there has been more competition happening on the Solo front, with those above and other friends, including Duane Richards (durichards) and Joe Hargadon (bomajoe).

Not only are they contending for highest medals and skill points against each other, but they're knocking me out of my top records for FNG in Solo mode; my work is cut out for me.

I'm getting stoked for the next LAN party, as it will be focusing on TrackMania United Forever. I'm not sure yet when it will be as life is mega-crazy right now, but we'll have FNG to tide us over til then.

Welcome to all the new FNGers, we're glad you're been bitten by the TrackMania craze! :)

That One Guy finally conquers Toxic's Machkeu Basin fastest lap record!

After more than a year of trying to conquer Toxic's (Dave Holland) fastest lap on Machkeu Basin, my day of glory hath finally arrived!

FNG Motocross Madness 2 scores

This is quite a funny story, actually. Thundr and I had been playing TrackMania Nations Forever with a couple of new FNGers, "Shartke" and "angus4ever". We had a ball, but the time came for the two to head out.

Thundr and I decided to change games to Motocross Madness 2 (MCM2) for a while before retiring to bed as well.

We raced a warm-up lap on Mosquito Hill and could definitely feel the rust factor (it probably didn't help that we'd just come from TrackMania and had to compensate for that.)

Anyway, Thundr and I decided to race Machkeu Basin, an FNG favorite. It started as a very casual race, with us chatting about various things going on in our lives, and me starting to nod off due to much sleep deprivation.

Despite that, my second lap on Machkeu felt really fast and very smooth. Out of curiosity I told Thundr I wondered if I had beaten Toxic's old record.

Now, try as I might for over a year, I couldn't touch his record... trying intently with all resources intact; so you can imagine how I almost wet myself when I looked up our site and saw that I really DID beat Toxic's record! And not just by .02 or .01 seconds, but 0.5 seconds! That's right, a half-second faster.

Toxic's old record was: 55.58 seconds
My new record is: 55.08 seconds

The proof is in the images below. So Toxic, my friend, consider the gauntlet thrown. I'm back in the saddle for Machkeu; are you up to the challenge?!!? muhahahaha! (Click the images to see the time in the top-left corner of the image.)

(Below: My 55.08 time)

(Below: Toxic's 55.58 time)


So Toxic, time for you to bring it. I triple-dog-dare you to beat that record. :)

FNG Report: 2008-11-28 - Turkey Bowl 2008 Second Edition - The Curse Returns

Holy crap, I realized I never posted the recap of our Thanksgiving weekend FNG; or Turkey Bowl 2008 Second Edition. I can't pass this up... the story must be told.

Before the story, I need to make mention that it was nice to see the return of BigBadMrT and Toxic to FNG. We're sorry it turned out to be a disaster for BigBadMrT, but hope he'll not let it frighten him away from making more frequent appearances.

In a sentence... Classic Thanksgiving weekend Turkey Bowl; it's a good thing we had a LAN Party Turkey Bowl before Thanksgiving this year.

It all started when 11:00pm rolled around and the first bad-omen sign was Atholon saying he was too tired to play.

When we finally rounded everyone up, we had BigBadMrT, DirtyDan (Tsam), ThatOneGuy, Thundr and Toxic.

ThatOneGuy hosted... as I launched the first race, we had two gamers' crash with GPF's and had to restart. I knew at that point we were already doomed.

Things went alright for the first three races, after the restart. But on the 4th race, Dead Man's Pass... Thundr and BigBadMrT lost internet connection. We never heard from BigBadMrT again; and we wouldn't hear back from Thundr for another 6 races.

Thundr returned long enough to tell us his router went on the fritz and would no longer provide him a reliable connection. He quickly hooked back up with us using an AirCard with his laptop to finish out the stunt and tag rounds. DirtyDan bowed out before the Tag round due to a funeral he needed to attend the next day.

Needless to say, take the results at face value... because we didn't have all the racers with us the entire time. Those that did get to race had a good time despite the hurdles.

So again, the FNG Turkey Bowl curse reared its ugly head once again... which is a shame. The track list is great and we'll have to race the tourney again later; MUCH later.

Results:

• ThatOneGuy: 206 points
• Toxic: 181 points
• DirtyDan: 169 points
• Thundr: 148 points
• BigBadMrT: 110 points

Fastest Laps:

• Cross Step: That One Guy - 01:44.08
• Crossed Streets: That One Guy - 02:08.26
• DDR: That One Guy - 01:29.48
• Dead Man's Pass: That One Guy - 01:45.16
• Funky Flyer SE: That One Guy - 00:56.99
• Machkeu Basin: That One Guy - 00:57.26
• Mosquito Hill: That One Guy - 01:26.58
• Pepsi Max: DirtyDan 01:39.69
• SnowFields: Toxic - 00:52.06

2008-12-05 FNG Report: Getting More TrackMania In Our Lives

So Thundr, DirtyDan (Tsam), Atholon, and myself made our return to TrackMania last Friday and tried a new server that is now a favorite we'll be frequenting.

It's called "Dirty Fun" ... and get your mind out of the gutter, it's an all dirt track server; which made for a drifting skidding roaring good time.

I made a return visit tonight to show my son and got to play an incredible track I have to share with all of you. You see, RC-style tracks are one of my favorite creations in TrackMania. They're a byproduct of the ultra-flexible Track/Replay Editor system Nadeo built into the game.

A track creator creates his/her track and changes the camera angle to be sky high looking down on your car and you get to control it like a Remote-Controlled car the entire race. Crusard made one called "Micro Machines" and tonight on this server I found "Remember Off Road?" by sol666. It's a blast and I highly recommend you download it immediately and give it a shot.



I really need to go through all my downloaded tracks and find all of this style of track, put them in their own special folder and make a playlist out of them. They rule.

Anyway, "Dirty Fun" has some dirt tracks that have cool mods too... one of them looking like yellow desert sands, somewhat like unto Yuma Sand Dunes from Motocross Madness 1, but much prettier. Tonight I raced one called "Ice Rally" that is a Stadium/Dirt track modded to look like winter. It has a smooth flow, is fast and really fun to race

So, looking forward to more of the same this Friday... hope to see you all there!

Turkey Bowl 2008 Results

Here are the results from the Turkey Bowl 2008 LAN Party. Thanks to all that came and made it a huge success; a fun time was had by all.

• That One Guy (Jeff Litster) - 218 pts
• Thundr (Jarin Blackham) - 186 pts
• Toxic Waste (David Holland) - 174 pts
• Dirty Dan (Dan Wetzel) - 172 pts
• Jet.User (Brennan Litster) - 118 pts
• d60dfath3r (Nick Gold) - 98 pts
• Beuchety (Tyler Beuchert) - 92 pts
• Atholon (Walt Weidner) - 86 pts

Turkey Bowl 2008 Details
The breakdown of the results, including best lap times can be found at the FNG site.

For the FNGers that played... please comment on this entry and tell what your favorite tracks were and favorite moments of the night!

FNG Report - 09/12/2008

Ok, so I forgot... there was something worth mentioning from FNG last Friday.

When Thundr and I finally got to some MCM2, we ended up playing some casual rounds of classic FNG favorites like Pepsi Max, Funky Flyer and Snowfields.

Without realizing it at first, I beat my own FNG record for Funky Flyer on my 2nd lap. It dawned on me in the middle of the 3rd lap, so I took a screenshot just-in-case; then confirmed it after we finished the race. Sure enough, I beat the old record by 0.29 seconds! I blame the DVI-D cable and 24" monitor. I'm having all kinds of good luck since I got those. :)


After that, we got the fever to beat Toxic's fastest lap on Snowfields and raced it about 10 times; getting worse each time, and completely unsuccessful in achieving the goal. But it was sure fun trying and we look forward to future record attempts.

So FNG wasn't so bad after all... those moments made up for all the crap earlier in the night.

Looking forward to the clan match this Friday... be there or be ... missing out.

FNG 09/05/2008 - Return to Motocross Madness 2

Thundr and I had a hankerin' for some MCM2 tonight; since we haven't been able to play after Tsam installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit on his system...



We had a blast and many cool moments were had. One of them is in the video below. We were racing Pepsi Max and I full-on spring-loaded the bike entirely over the mountain with a clearance of what looks like about 4-6 feet or so from the top of the mountain! It's probably my best springload ever.





My apologies for the poor quality. I'm just learning Sony Vegas Studio and need to learn how to make good compression but keep the quality (the original file is about 630MB.) I'll try to get a better quality one I can link to on the FNG server later.



There were other moments that we could get some killer screenshots from, but don't have time yet. Below is one Jarin took during Grassy Knoll SE. I had finished the race and backtracked so I could watch Thundr's final jump. He missed it and had to climb the hill past the broken bridge. Instead he smacked the bridge and went twirling off the screen. It was pretty funny... if we got that one on VCR, we'll have to capture the twirl and post it here... if not, the pic will have to do.



If we get time, we'll post more later...

I'm definitely looking forward to getting back into MCM2 more again; especially since it's nearing time for Turkey Bowl 2008. We'll probably spend some of the next few Fridays going through the Track DVDs and trying to generate a new pack for this year's Bowl; then of course, some TrackMania; cause, well, you can never get enough of that...

FNG 08/29/2008

We played TrackMania United Forever on the "Let's Rock!!!" server (We being: That One Guy, Tsam, and Atholon [for a few minutes]).

It was an interesting night. There were always 50+ racers on the server. I only played for 2 hours; Tsam joined me late and stayed after I left, so I'm not sure how long he was on.

I placed in the top 10 twice and spent the rest of the time between 15th and 25th. Somehow, I still earned over 4,000 Ladder Points taking me to 19,000+ points; putting me 13th in the Utah Zone and in the high 60,000's in the World Zone.

It was a good time and a lot of good competition, as it always is on that server. They have a great mix of old and new tracks... the old always classics from our intense TrackMania Nations days... "Let's Rock!!!" is definitely an FNG favorite to play on.

Tsam, come tell us how you fared!

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.

We Need More TrackMania In Our Lives...

ThatOneGuy on "DealBreaker"
a track by Dill
skinned with the "TMX City Nights" mod by Crusard

(large image is 7MB ... click to view)

Atholon, Tsam, Thundr and myself had a really great time tonight with TrackMania Forever. We played on a Nations server since someone, we won't mention names (Atholon), hasn't ponied-up for TrackMania United Forever yet. :)

We played on a crazy server called "RF Playground" that had wild tracks to solve that reminded me of the good ole days in TrackMania Nations ESWC when we used to play on the 440 Mods and Boost server that ZHaDuM/MoXLeY used to host (later renamed to a KOFS server.) We used to get our game on there because the tracks were incredibly challenging and uber-creative. Our passion for those tracks was the fact that the first set of fun for it was to learn how to "solve" the track. Then it was time to figure out how to nail a flawless fast ride on it. Good times.

Anyway, the last track we played on it tonight was the one you see in the image above. It was incredible. No one finished it the first time. The second time only one did. The third time the same driver finished twice in one round.

I told the group I hadn't had this much fun being owned by a track in a LONG time. After the third round and no one from FNG finished; we jumped off the server and started our own to practice that track. There was no way I was finishing the night off with a track owning me.

Thundr and I were the only ones left by then, so we played it til we nailed it. I was fortunate enough to have 3/5 finishes during my final round. I told Thundr, "It's official; this track no longer owns me. It now only has a time-share."

The "TMX City Nights" mod Crusard made is incredible. I'm going to have to seek out more of his, because we were impressed with the "Sweet Dream" track (which included a candy world mod Crusard also created) - one of the most creative mods we've seen. Crusard has a gift; a gift I wish I possessed. So kudos to you, Crusard. Thanks for a killer mod that made a great track better.

I'd post the link to the DealBreaker track, but I couldn't find it on TMX. If anyone reading this can find a TMX link, please add a comment!

It's all just further proof that we all need more TrackMania goodness in our lives. See you at the races.

FNG Rocks the Nations (Forever)

Tonight we had five FNGers representing:

• Atholon (Walt)
• BigBadMrT (Mark)
• Thundr (Jarin)
• Tsam (Dan)
• ThatOneGuy (Jeff)

We raced on "Floyd's TM Nations Fun House" server with a host of fun racers. The server had anywhere from 23 - 30 people on at any given time.

We took turns on the podium and earned a lot of ladder points tonight (which we normally don't care about; as we get on these servers to have a good time racing people...) It was just funny to see us start with so little points tonight and walk away with so much.

For instance, I started with somewhere around 700 points when we began racing tonight; I left the server with 4073.

We all had a blast and played from 10:30pm to 1:00am.

We're getting more and more stoked for GEEX Show. I'm going to see if I can get a logo designed with my TrackMania car and FNG in it for an embroidered shirt. If it goes well and we like it; we can wear it to the GEEX Show LAN party (especially the TrackMania tournament.)

FNG 04/25/2008 - Report

Not much to report. Jeff is still battling pneumonia and was probably getting some much needed sleep. I ended up playing TMF online for a few hours. There was one track that had a pretty cool mod. It was a candy theme with M&M roads, candycane poles, and even had an evil ghost that gets you if you crash! It was very creative!

I'm not sure if I'm going to make it this Friday. I have graduation Saturday morning, and it's probably not a good idea to fall asleep while walking up to get a diploma!