FNG Motocross Madness 2 Records Restored

Tonight, while testing Motocross Madness 2 network connectivity in virtual machines (both Windows XP and Vista) across the internet with Thundr, I realized our website has been missing all of the Best Lap scores for probably 5 years or more!  After successfully completing a multiplayer race on Machkeu Basin, we decided to look up the best lap to see how close we fared after many years away from the game.  Seeing they were gone, I panicked and started searching my source code history to find them.  After realizing I'd ported the site to a new repository and hadn't brought the history with it, I wanted to cry.

Thanks to the help of the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" I was able to restore the missing records to our live site.  This will make the upcoming Turkey Bowl LAN party more enjoyable as we make a long overdue comeback to MCM2!

Go check out what you're up against at our Motocross Madness 2 page.  Some of the scores have VCR files that you can load in the game and watch the replay of the record being set.  I don't know about you, but I'm setting my sights on shattering Dave Holland's records on "Machkeu Basin" and "Snowfields".

I'm really looking forward to some high-flying, spring-loading good times with you all as we bring back this epic classic to Friday Night Gaming!  I can't wait to hit Bear Mountain and Halfgrand Playground for some intense stunt matches, "have a ball" in the smaller arenas playing Stunt Ball Tag, and get "TIMERED!" on the National tracks we love so much.

See you at the races!

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!

Freakin' Awesome Motocross Madness 2 Video

Remember when games used to ROCK?!  Remember when they allowed LAN play and didn't require an always on connection?  Remember when they were full of magic and wonder?

Well, check out this nostalgic video of my favorite game of all time... Motocross Madness 2.  Fun music and killer use of the in-game camera.

I thought I had some mad stunt skills, but the riders in this put me to shame.  FNGers will love seeing our staple 360's in here too.  Good times!!!

Watch the MCM2 video at YouTube

Please, please, PLEASE, Rainbow... give us the source code so we can make it work for everyone in Windows Vista and 7!!!  We want to keep playing...

Click the image above to see full-size

Thanks for all the good times for the past 10 years, Rainbow Studios, and the entire Motocross Madness community.

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

FNG: The #1 Thing To Do in Utah on a Friday Night

So I was checking out some Google Analytics for the blog to see what kind of keywords were driving people to our site.

It appears there are still a lot of people playing Age of Empires I and II and looking to find the command-line parameters (no doubt to skip the intro cinematics when they launch the game.)

In just a few short days, there were 29 phrases that brought gamers to our site from the search engines. My favorite:

what to do on a friday night in utah (Our site was #1 and #2 of about 512,000)


I guess that means we're the #1 thing to do on a Friday night in Utah! I'll have to agree. :)

Phrases that brought the most people here in the last few days included the words 2008 turkey bowl in whatever order and added some words in some cases. I guess there are a lot of "Turkey Bowls" out there. We happened to be #3 of about 695,000 for the exact phrase "2008 turkey bowl"; not too shabby!

We're doing pretty well with some TrackMania, PURE, and Motocross Madness 2 search phrases too.

Anyway, I had to share... that "what do to on a friday night in utah" had me in stitches for several minutes. FNG rocks; the most popular Friday night activity in Utah... heh

Turkey Bowl 2008 - Second Edition

Turkey Bowl 2008 - Second Edition
Friday 28 November 2008; 11:00pm
(Feel free to meet earlier for practice if you like)

If you don't already have them, you'll need the following 2 track packs from the FNG website:
Turkey Bowl 2008 Track Pack
lanparty.exe track pack

We took the 4 most fun nationals tracks from this year's Turkey Bowl LAN Party and coupled them with the most popular FNG favorites for what will be an incredible second showdown for 2008. Be there, or be roosted.

Nationals:
Cross Step
Crossed Streets
DDR
Dead Man's Pass
Funky Flyer SE
Mackheu Basin
Mosquito Hill
Pepsi Max
Snowfields

Stunts:
Halfgrand Playground

Tag:
Tag Arena 3

Please leave a comment if you can make it!

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!

Official Turkey Bowl 2008 Track Pack

Download the Official Turkey Bowl 2008 Track Pack

Included in the pack:
Nationals:

• Cross Step
• Crossed Streets
• Cutting Corners
• Danger Forest
• Danger Island 2
• Danger Style
• Daredevils Playground
• DDR
• dd-Radical Ridge
• Dead Man's Pass

Stunts:

• Halfgrand Playground

This year's Turkey Bowl introduces 10 brand-new-to-FNG National tracks; 4-5 of which will become new FNG favorites, to be sure.

The Turkey Bowl will be played at a special FNG LAN Party this Friday at That One Place; with a potential rematch on the traditional Thanksgiving Weekend during FNG online. Be sure to join us one way or another! Even if you can't be there for the Turkey Bowl, download the pack; because the tracks are a blast to ride.

The LAN Party Turkey Bowl starts PROMPTLY at 8:30pm this Friday 07 November 2008!!!

2008 Turkey Bowl Line-Up

Nationals (3 laps each)

• Cross Step
• Crossed Streets
• Cutting Corners
• Danger Forest
• Danger Island 2
• Daredevils Playground
• DDR
• dd-Radical Ridge
• Dead Man's Pass

Stunts (10-minute rounds)

• Halfgrand Playground
• Bear Mountain

Tag (10-minute round)

• Arena Tag (TBD)

Quest for the 2008 Turkey Bowl Track Pack

2008 Turkey Bowl Candidate Track Packs:
Candidate Track Pack #1 (posted 11 October 2008)
Candidate Track Pack #2 (posted 18 October 2008)
Candidate Track Pack #3 (posted 19 October 2008)
Candidate Track Pack #4 (posted 30 October 2008)
Stunt Candidates Track Pack (posted 01 November 2008)

On 11 October 2008, FNG embarked on a several week journey to discover 10 really enjoyable
tracks from the DVD collection that we haven't played before.

ThatOneGuy and Atholon played through Candidate Track Pack #1 on 11 October and found 2 really cool tracks to add to the list:
Cross Step
Cross Streets

Cross Step is a sweet, nicely-timed rhythm track (like unto Mosquito Hill) that has some HUGE jumps, especially near the very end. (click the pic below to see the biggest jump, right before the finish.) Notice how far back the camera is from my rider... that will help you get a feel for how big the jump really is. The hangtime, needless to say, is incredible. Much tail-whippage will be had.

Cross Streets is a fun track that has a bunch of custom models inside. You race in and out of the streets, with some construction zones and what not to potentially hamper progress. They made good use of the moving vehicles concept in MCM2, including helicopters... part of your route on the track has you driving past the Helipad on the roof of a building.

ThatOneGuy played solo on 18 October and went through Candidate Track Pack #2. Thundr was going to join but was too tired. I found two more tracks to add to the tourney:
Cutting Corners
Danger Forest

Candidate Track Pack #3 is available for download... we'll play it next week... and I'll continue updating this post with the new Candidate Track Packs as they become available.

Please feel free to race each of the tracks in the Track Packs and rate them 1-5 (1 being "The Suck" and 5 being "Tourney Material!") and tell us your ratings by commenting on this post. Please, when you comment, make sure to list the Track Pack, then each Track Name and the rating you give it.

And feel free to join us for some serious Motocross Madness 2 action over the next several weeks. The verdict isn't out yet on whether we're doing a LAN Party for Turkey Bowl in November, or the usual attempt at a WAN Party on Thanksgiving weekend for it. Look for updates on that soon as well. (I'm hoping for LAN Party; but if enough people can't make LAN but could make WAN, we'll opt for the WAN for Turkey Bowl.)

Happy racing!

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...

TrackMania Breaks World Record

TrackMania broke its own world record in the Guiness Book of World Records: Gamer's Edition by having 250 racers in one track on one server at one time; making it the largest online race in the world!

A video was produced from replays from the event and is available on the Official TrackMania Website.

A "sneak peek" of the upcoming 2008 Gamer's Edition Annual of the Guinness Book of World Records includes some interesting facts about TrackMania like:

• "Largest content base of any racing game." (which tells me they either: surpassed the content created for Motocross Madness 2 (MCM2); or Guiness isn't aware of the 6 DVDs worth of compressed content I possess that makes up most, if not all custom content created for it.)
• "Most nationalities in an offline racing competition" (34 nations)
• "Most popular user-created video (using in-game materials...)

There are some fun pictures and facts about the phenomenon that is TrackMania. I've said it before and I'll say it again; if you haven't tried TrackMania, you really don't know what you're missing.

TrackMania Nations Forever is free, so go download it today and join the ranks of millions of TrackManiacs around the world. You'll be glad you did.