Coming up is an important moment of my life.
Wait for it.
Oh wait, that wasn’t it.
Just a second.
YEAH!
Here it is.
This was the moment that I beat Dirt Rally, in the hardest championship.
With just a keyboard.
You may remember my video from a few months ago, showering this game with praise and stuff.
Well, since then I have been chipping away at it, stage by stage, rally by rally.
The menu music became synonymous with a new day and a new racing challenge.
Its track wonderfully peaks and troughs in time with the stages of the menu, beating
me up into a frenzy before I was to beat my car in a frenzy over the troughs and peaks
of a new track.
It became part of my daily routine that I’d have breakfast and then try beating a race
or two without dropping my place on the leaderboard too much.
With each new tournament the cars got faster, my opponents, better, and the road seemingly
bumpier and slipperier.
And it’s taken this long.
But it was worth it ‘cos I actually feel like I’ve achieved something!
Dirt Rally is the Dark Souls of racing.
You start utterly useless, each race a seemingly insurmountable challenge.
And yet you get there.
You shave seconds off your times.
You master the most difficult bits until it’s only the easier ones that surprise you.
But it’s been more than that for me.
Dirt Rally has been a life lesson!
I have genuinely walked away from this game thinking that I’m a better person!
I used to be a perfectionist.
A dirty quick-saver.
I hate knowing that I could have done better in games.
But with Dirt Rally, being a perfectionist doesn’t get you far.
You can ALWAYS do better.
Do you honestly want to spend 20 hours perfecting a single race, when you could have botched
it a bit and beaten dozens?
It’s intense stuff, you’ll be on the edge of your seat for most of it.
And yet it leaves that bit of your brain free that likes to go wandering and thinking of
silly things.
For example: What are these spectators thinking?
Stood in a freezing cold, muddy field for hours just to see my car hurtle past in a
matter of seconds- and that’s if they’re lucky!
All too often I have skidded out of control and ploughed into the crowd in terrifying
ways.
Worst of all, it gives me a 15 second penalty which is enough to ruin my day and often leads
me restarting the entire race.
I haven’t obsessed about small things this much since I became addicted to Solitaire.
For example, although beating the game requires 100’s of races, there are only 6 different
locations.
And boy, do they handle differently!
You get Wales, a classic rally experience where each bump risks hurtling you off the
track.
You get Greece, where each loose bit of gravel risks hurtling you off the track.
You have Monaco, where the track risks hurtling you off the track.
Honestly, I still can’t beat this stage.
Your car becomes a drug addict and snow becomes cocaine.
And then there’s Germany which is super easy and you’ll get highscores every time.
These feel sort of like how other racing games do.
Long fast bits, connected by nasty 90 degree corners and stuff.
These stand out as being different from the rest of the game!
The only thing you really have to be careful of are the boulders that hide in every corner.
I’m beginning to suspect that these are the gravestones of drivers who have ignored
their co-driver.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that each of these locations is just one long track,
with the game choosing different start points, directions and lengths to add variety.
In other games, this would be lazy!
But in Dirt Rally, it’s a blessing.
Many a time I’d look around and be like ‘OOH I know where I am now!’
and 2 different places in my mind would suddenly merge to make one that felt a lot more familiar
and homely.
At points I would spend 4 hours mastering a small bit of a track, only to later on discover
on another race that I was on the same bit again!
Muscle memory would kick in and I’d thrash the AI drivers along those stretches.
Oh, how I obsessed about these.
You never see these guys- by the time you reach the start line they’re already long-gone,
their times waiting to taunt you at every checkpoint.
How did you manage that stretch so quickly, A Dahl?!
Who on the dev team ramped up K Wojcik’s stats so high that he became my worthy arch-nemesis?
All those hours perfecting stages gave me time to ponder the lap times.
How did the devs get them so perfect?
Each championship up forces you to relearn your driving technique and lasts just long
enough for you to catch up before raising the bar again.
Some bits of races are almost too fast for me to believe, while others are reassuringly
slow and help me to catch up a bit.
When setting these times, did devs play?
Or did they get pros to come in and to race the courses?
And were they allowed to retry each segment individually, or were they forced to play
through the whole race in one go as the player is?
How many attempts did they have to set a high score?
And so on.
But what matters is where you want to come in the race.
Are you happy being 6th, or do you actually want to win?
If you do then the game becomes a lesson in probability.
About striking that impossible balance between speed and reliability.
To win you must take chances around a number of corners- and doing so greatly reduces your
odds of surviving the race.
You WILL crash.
You WILL fly off cliffs.
And you WILL make mountains out of molehills.
You will never get a perfect race in Dirt Rally- only the best compromise you’re willing
to accept.
You will become irrational, obsessing over the first 30 seconds for hours then botching
the other 90% of a race, even though it would have made sense just to do the whole thing
over and over for a more balanced time.
You WILL live in terror after you achieve the perfect start, knowing that any small
mistake will send you back to the beginning again.
I’ve never felt anything like this before in a racing game.
I love it.
And hate it.
But love it.
If you haven’t played the game then these will just sound like insane ramblings.
But it has had a profound effect on my experience.
I know my rivals’ names!
I feel I know their personalities, despite never having seen them in-game.
They aren’t even rendered and yet I know them better than in most racing games!
When I get a good score, I can imagine the other drivers feeling disappointed.
When a race feels a little too easy, I know before I see the leaderboard that my arch
nemesis has suffered a terrible crash somewhere and that it’ll be a rare easy win for me.
But those seconds I saved on one race, I soon lose to a blunder on another one.
And as much as I like to think every little bit matters, when the end of an event finally
came, those few seconds seldom made a difference to my actual placing.
And even if they did, zoom out to the tournament level and they probably didn’t.
This is the life lesson that I took away from this game- to keep the bigger picture in mind
to give perspective to what I’m currently working on.
I guess I discovered this with Dirt Rally because, although it felt like a long ordeal,
my progress still moved a lot faster than with most challenges in my life.
I soon realised how ridiculous it was to spend 90% of my time obsessing over maybe 0.1% of
the tracks, when for far less effort I could have had the same result by just being slightly
better at the rest of it!
Condensing so much of my time and effort into a single number at the end of the tournament
revealed how trivial the things I obsessed about in attaining it really were.
To move onto the next tournament effectively wiped the slate clean and rendered all of
my former hopes and concerns about my progress irrelevant.
It’s like how your entire school experience is reduced to a few grades, or how your degree
becomes just a single number and how that’s then the thing that you and everybody you
meet cares about.
In a rather bleak way I think this is symbolic of life as a whole.
But even I think I’m finding too much meaning in what is essentially a car-flinging simulator.
I’m sad to have beaten Dirt Rally.
It’s like the end of an era for me!
But from it I have learned so much.
And not just that meaningless, wishy-washy life lesson stuff either!
You actually get BETTER at this game.
Hell, by the end you might even be able to steer a RWD car!
Having beaten the best, I can now return to easier tournaments and CRUSH the foes who
used to challenge me!
Power has gone to my head- I really do think that what I’ve learned from this game could
save my life if I ever start skidding on the road or whatever.
Suddenly my Dirt Rally instincts will kick in and I’ll turn it into a really cool skid
that clears the corner perfectly and makes its way to the top of Reddit in some way.
I can but dream.
Dirt Rally- a horribly, beautifully repetitive and challenging game where it’s you against
numbers, probability and every hill, bump, man and tree in existence.