Racer Boy

I’ve played a lot of computer games over the years starting with things like Elite on the Sinclair Spectrum. For the last 13 years I’ve mainly played games accessed via the Steam store. All games purchased via Steam come with Steam achievements. Some have very few like SimRail, a new game I’m currently trying out – 4 in this case. Others have a multitude – The Hunter: Call of the Wild has 164 and the number increases with each new map. In a player’s Steam Profile the number of Completed games is recorded. This doesn’t mean that the player got through to defeat the final boss in a game as you might suppose. Instead it means that the player has completed all of the Steam Achievements for that game. If you think about it, that’s logical since not all games have an actual finale – many, especially simulation games, are open ended. I have 77 games in my Steam Profile. Guess how many I’ve actually completed in terms of Steam achievements?…

…You would need to guess if you went to my Steam Profile because I’ve got a review of last year’s gaming as my display. But if I were to choose the Completionist display then you’d see that I have completed just 2 of those 77 games I own! I think you can guess which those two are…

…Yes, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator! These are two games that I intend to keep fully up to date and every time there is a new map with more Steam Achievements it’s all hands to the pump to get things back up to date asap😅

I recently completed the storyline of the game Winds of Change but as noted above, completing the game does not usually complete all the Steam Achievements. In this case there are 4 more achievements to be gained by making different choices as you pass through the story and there are 2 additional hidden achievements that are probably activated by choosing one of those alternative paths. It occurs to me that I could complete that game by going back and choosing differently. I’m not quite ready to do that yet but I will sometime in the future.

You might think that I’d be nearing completion on Farming Simulator 22? Not a bit of it – I’ve got 14 of the possible achievements leaving 23 outstanding. A couple of those will probably drop eventually as they are based on doing a specific thing a lot of times (wrapping Bales for example). But others require choosing a different style of farming that doesn’t really interest me – Horses come to mind. From my last experience with a friends real life horse, I’d need to take anti-histamine tablets while I was playing🤣

However, with Trucking currently in slow-mo because I’m waiting for the next update to release, I have been looking for a game that I am within touching distance of completing. Over the last two weeks, between farming on Osada for my Fresh Fields posts, I have been working hard in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. I had 38 Achievements out of a total of 46 for the game and this week I’ve knocked off 3 of those 👍

‘Rich Guy’ – This one just requires purchasing a new car from the salon. Easy enough once you have a big enough bank balance and I’ve certainly got that. I bought myself an ex-Police Crown Victoria.

‘New Heart’ – Requires that you replace the engine of a car with a different one. Most cars have alternative engines that they can be fitted with. I bought a wreck from the junkyard – A Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R. This was the standard version with the normally aspirated engine. I then built a new engine – the Turbocharged version – and swapped them over. I was worried that as I was doing this swap on a workshop mod vehicle, it might not trigger the Achievement but it did😎

And now to the title of this post – ‘Racer Boy’. This Achievement requires that you take a car to the race track and complete a lap in under 1 minute 50 seconds. A friend of mine tells me he did it in a mildly tweaked Dacia Duster – I don’t doubt it for a minute but I did wonder how many laps he had to drive round gradually improving his times as he got to know the track well enough to break through the time barrier. Anyway, my previous attempts had resulted in failure despite choosing cars that ought to have been pretty good through the tighter parts of the circuit – like the V6-engined Renault Clio!

The car that finally allowed me, with my older fingers, to cross the line came from the junkyard. When I first bought it I was only going to do it up and sell it. But as I worked on it, I started to see its potential. It is a Volkswagen Beetle…

…Not exactly a standard version with its carbon fibre trunk…

…and those wide ‘Slick’ tyres, The low ground-effect wings front and back…

…and the re-contoured hood with aerodynamic downforce tell you this in a racing machine. The hidden ingredient – which I didn’t really take any notice of when I was looking at it in the junkyard – is the engine. It has a Porsche 964 Turbo and it goes like …!😂

I sat on the start line at the track with the engine revving – can I do it this time? The lights went green and we were away! Despite some caution on that first lap it completed the lap from a standing start in bang on 2 minutes. I continued into the second lap and we crossed the line just a couple of tenths over 1:50. The 3rd lap nailed it when, despite kissing a barrier, we crossed the line in 1:48. I called it a day with the achievement gained, but a part of me is wondering just what time would’ve been possible in this machine if I’d kept going for a few more laps and honed my skills a bit😅 The car is part of my story now and won’t be sold😎

So that’s three of my outstanding Achievements done. The remaining 5 are all grind type Achievements involving story jobs and buying cars from the junkyard and from auctions to renovate and sell them. I already have some of the requirements for each of these – it’s just a case of nibbling away at them until they drop. The annoying thing is that unlike a lot of Achievements for other games, there is no indicator to tell you how close you are to completing🙄 Still, it will be a pleasant surprise when each of them drops 😂👍