The other day I played OOA for an hour and a half straight trying to beat nZero’s time for Goal B and only managed to marginally improve my own record. With one run in Time Attack lasting about four and a half minutes, that’s a whole lotta gaming where you need to stay focused at all times. So I was feeling a bit annoyed with the game, or more  appropriately, my lack of progress.

But then there was some talk about the game and the different cars in it in the irc channel. It reminded me that I’ve never actually driven all the available cars. When I started with the game I just looked at the leaderboards, saw the F40 was a pretty popular choice and went with that. So I figured giving the other cars a test drive might be a good way to refreshen the game. That was an excellent decision. After mere few runs I already improved my Goal B record a bit and with multiple cars to boot (still not enough to top nZero, though). There are very subtle differences in how the cars behave, though they all have the same top speed. Meaning the differences are in acceleration, turning speed, drifting control, and so forth.

In all honesty, in most cases I couldn’t tell what was different compared to the F40. But in two cars’ cases I could: The Dino 246 GTS recovers from a drift very quickly. This of course allows it to start building up speed again faster and lessens the chance of fishtailing. But this can also work against the driver, since it’s easier to accidentally end a drift when you’re supposed to do a counter direction drift. Dino is also narrower than most other cars, which I felt made it harder to grip through corners as effectively.

The other car is the Testarossa. Compared to the F40 it turns very slightly faster. This means easier time gripping through some corners and thanks to Testarossa I even managed to improve my time in Sunny Beach, for the first time in quite a while. I can’t tell if the car’s acceleration is any slower than the F40′s or if it has any other “flaws”. But because I’m so used to the F40′s turning speed I occasionally find myself turning too fast into a counter direction drift (in the last S-curve in National Park, for example) and lose some speed due to hitting the rougher terrain.

In any case, today I was running Goal B again and managed to beat nZero’s time not once, but twice with the Testarossa. And it took me only 30 minutes or so. The latter time beating his by a whooping quarter of a second. I also improved my course times here and there. Speaking of, in order to better see my progress through the game I created a spreadsheet with all my best course times, calculated my theoretical best route times from those (and display my actual best route times as well) and compare it to the #1 time on the leaderboards. The resulting chart can be viewed here.

From that it’s easy to see that I’m doing my best on Goals B and C (for which I’m currently in leaderboard positions #18 and #15 respectively) and worst on Goal E. I was however glad to see the differences between my theoretical and actual times aren’t that terrible (aside from Goal E) after all. I thought I was way more inconsistent. I think I’ll work on my Goal C times next, as I’m already doing pretty good there. Would be nice to break into the Top 10 leaderboards for one route.

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