Technique level up

I must’ve played Outrun Online Arcade for ~20 hours now and I’m still not quite sure how to optimally shift gears and bring the car up to speed at the start. I did manage to get a 0’57”xxx time on the first stage once, so I must’ve done it pretty well at least once…such a shame I’m not sure what it was and I wasn’t recording at the time. This might be my utter and complete lack of knowledge on anything relating to real cars and how they work shining through here. RPM, whazzat?

It also took me waaaay longer than I care to admit to notice that my gear shift drifting was pretty suboptimal. I used to do it with two clearly seperate button presses, now it’s one smooth, fluid motion as my thumb slides from the Shift Down button to the Shift Up button in a fraction of a second. That simple correction to my technique was enough to shave off quite a bit of time. Now if I could just figure out when to use brake drifting…currently I just always gear shift drift.

My times are improving constantly, which is nice. Seems there’s always something I can either not mess up in or figure out how to do faster. I managed to place as #15 in Goal C and even got a respectable time for Goal D. Milky Way, the final stage of that route, is my least favourite stage in the game. It’s so easy to hit a wall there thanks to the very narrow road. The second corner is the most annoying, it’s a long curve you need to drift and it ends with a sharp corner to the other direction. And because it’s a night level I find it a bit difficult to see where that corner starts, making timing the counter-drift all that more difficult. Luckily my best time on that stage is recorded, I’ll need to study the footage and see if I can find some visual cues on when to do it.

And lastly, I got a confidence boost in multiplayer. I raced one-on-one (catch-up off, collisions on) against someone very close to my own skill level. We did three full runs (he quit during the fourth) and I won two of them. The one I lost was by 0.15 or so seconds. Later when I checked his rankings in Time Attack I found him to be in Top 15 for some routes. Nice.