• He/Him

say evil words
mean nice things


The Crew, a funny driving game published by hated entity ubisoft, is getting pulled off conventional existence next month, and it happens to be a game i love a lot. Specifically, the "Skills" system shown here is one of my favorite game mechanics of all time and i wish i had another 200 hours to spend with it. Every one of these little icons is some sort of time attack challenge. Some off-road, some asphalt, some precise some allowing a great deal of routing and creativity. None of them are more than a minute long, and get graded based on a bronze, silver, gold, platinum scale, while also saving your scores and keeping a global leaderboard, showing you when your friends beat em. Many of them are made of specific hand-crafted routes, and when they are made of specific routes they more often than not feature two unique routes depending on which direction you hit them from, with a lot of those featuring four routes in an X pattern, each either looping around eventually or more often just going on and on to account for longer and longer world record attempts. Skills with multiple routes all get graded the same so it adds a bit of brain usage to just hitting the checkpoints right and fast. What this map might or might not show is what it's like to actually do what i did here, because if you know anything about the crew you might know that this map is around 100 miles from seattle to the florida keys, a half hour drive in the fastest class of vehicle, which is not the reality but not nothing either. I didn't use any fast traveling, but i did use public transit between cities, so going from icon to icon in whatever car i was going to attempt the skill in is half the fun, seeing the scenery slowly change as you earn medal after medal, trying to ace every turn on the way, warming up. Then you get there and try to get in the groove, go for your best time, slippery ass physics and random traffic making the ideal line hard to find. As you're grinding away bouncing your pickup truck over hill and dale for half an hour in your real life trying to set a 10 second time the sun is going down in the game, and now you're relying on your headlights to find your braking points and your times are suffering for it. Maybe another player shows up and now you have to kind of take turns because you will just run into each other on the way otherwise. Maybe you're on voice with someone and comparing notes as you try it one after the other for hours trying to get a fraction of a second. and then theres like 200 more to try ive never counted them or got a number. i will never get to put as much time into these as i want to, even if the game survived forever or if i get on one of the fan solutions that hopefully pop up, but i wanted to at least conquer them all in some respect before the official end. i know they show up again in 2 but im almost afraid to check if the scale is anything close, i can't imagine it is but maybe im super wrong. this game's so stupid and so cheesy and the fact that the most simple idea in the world, little nodes you can do time attacks on, except theres a lot of them, can bring me so much joy is some sort of statement about how i see games and the world. some people say you have to create your own fun, but i always felt like you just need to realize everything in the world is fun with like half an ounce of effort added. i dont know. im gonna miss this fuckin thing.


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