Need for Speed newbie to UK champ in 2 weeks

Posted by: xilef

Article written by Steven "Stune" Embling

Getting 250 Gamerscore on Most Wanted and completing Underground 2 on the PS2, that’s about as far as my Need for Speed experience went a couple of weeks prior to the Need for Speed: Pro Street WCG UK final. Not exactly a prime candidate to win the tournament you wouldn’t think? Frankly I had my doubts also. I had little idea of who was who in the Need for Speed community and to make matters worse it would also be my first PC tournament in pro gaming so far. But in search of a fresh challenge I decided to give it a go.

Initial info

With odds firmly stacked against me the first stage wasn’t to get playing straight away, but to find out a little about the game itself in terms of its competitive side. Since I was at this stage understandably clueless I made info gathering my no1 priority. I had to work out if it was feasible for me to learn the game to such a standard in 2 weeks otherwise I would be better off playing in PGR4, where past experience would have almost certainly guaranteed me at the very least a top 3 finish.

First stop in my info gathering mission was a guy who knows a thing or two about converting his skills to various different games and seems to have been in pro gaming since the start of time, R2k. Now despite not actually having played NFS competitively he tends be very observant and was able to tell me quite a few things about the game and its communities. He led me to a guy who was also entering NFS in the UK this year and he was able to give me more info about the game. Understandably he was reluctant to tell me everything because he didn’t want me beating him of course. This was the general attitude from the NFS community who tend to keep info such as their own best lap times and car setups to themselves.

Other than the results of the online qualifiers I didn’t have a lot to go on in terms of knowledge of my opponents so I thought id find out the results of the previous tournament. Sadly it proved too difficult to find a first, second and third list anywhere on the net, but thankfully our Fifa player ChrisyB and GM Ben remembered that Dignitas Moyes was the reigning UK camp from last year. No one seemed too sure weather he was attending this year but I was slowly building a picture of who my main competitors were.

Game install

So ready to embark on a new adventure I purchased and installed the game. Then I downloaded the WCG save and put it where the readme file accompanying the save file said to put it, but the game bizarrely didn’t detect the file. Not a great start! I experimented putting the save file in a few different places and finally the game detected the save. Only problem was it needed version 1.1 to load it. I went to the game’s ‘search for updates’ section but it said I had the latest version of the game installed. Only that was completely false because it was the standard 1.0 I installed from the disk. I searched Google for the version 1.1 patch and eventually found and downloaded it. Having installed the game patch I booted up the game only for it to crash straight after the intro. On the second and third attempt it repeated the crash and left me with no alternative but to uninstall the game along with the patch and start the whole procedure from scratch once again. So far such experience reminded me why I hadn’t got into competitive pc gaming in the past. Having repeated the whole install process again it miraculously started working. That left me with the small matter of……….. Actually learning to play the game!

Learning the game

The car choice was forced as I didn’t need to worry about learning a variety of different vehicles before the event. This allowed me to focus on each of the tracks with the one car. I spent about a day on each track just to get to know the general layout of each circuit and the fastest racing lines. While doing that I also hit YouTube to try and get some kind of idea where I could improve my laps, look at how other drivers from around the world were using their NOS and where any shortcuts or Wallrides are, amongst any other general tricks I could learn to improve my game. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to gauge what kind of stage you are in terms of learning with some of the things people do on YouTube. Some people speed up their vids to make their lap times look faster, say they are using one version of a car when they are using something different or highly modified. People also claim they use no nos when you can clearly see their Nos metre going down regardless of some poor quality videos. Despite all these issues if you are careful about what to look for you can learn a lot from player’s YouTube vids. When people are proud of their times they are often happy to share them with the world to get their name out there. What they may not realise is that it creates a nice big bullseye on their name and can help possible opponents.

As I learnt the tracks something I had to do was change the car setup specifically for each track. Being a newbie to the series meant I didn’t know if there were any special tricks to setting up your car to help improve lap times. Being an experienced racer on a number of other racing games I know only too well that setups can win or lose you races before they even start. I also knew that despite most racing games having similar settings to tweak the same variables they tend to have completely different outcomes on the car’s performance from game to game depending on its realism, so this was something to be extremely weary of in considering NFS is on the more arcadey scale. It meant many hours of tweaking sliders individually for each track.

As well as learning the tracks and car setup there were vital other things I also desperately needed to know about the game. Things such as why it was important to use the games Manual with Clutch setting in preference to ordinary manual or automatic. The game gives players of Manual with Clutch the advantage of no turbo lag between shifts meaning the turbo is still doesn’t stop during shifts so the engine has good power as soon as you engage the new gear. Of course it’s far more difficult using that setting as the player is required to press two buttons at identical times on every shift up or down, but that added difficultly is a trade-off for extra potential speed.

The Qualifier

5 days before the start of I34 there was a qualifier held at the bullring in Birmingham. It was a simple task, the fastest lap time for each day wins a place at the final in i34. My job was to make sure that’s what happened as I wasn’t enrolled to the online qualifiers. Even if I didn’t win I would most probably learn something from someone better, that was my intention anyway, but thankfully I set comfortably the fastest lap time of the day and the weekend. This meant I had qualified for a spot in the final at I34. In the remaining 5 days I worked further on my consistency to make sure that a typical lap was not too far off my best in preparation for the tournament. I also thought about tactical use of my Nos and other things to make the most of a certain situation on a psychological level.

The Tournament

Finally I would get to see if the last two weeks had paid off. I met most of the bigname competitors before the matches started and many seemed to think I was a firm favourite to win. I was a bit flattered by such comments and I was completely honest about my 2 week learning period. But even the admin’s seeded me as no1 over last year’s winner Dignitas Moyes and the online qualifiers which was a huge surprise to me.  Now all it took was for me to live up to my reputation. I had a bye in the first round and none of the first three opponents caused me too much trouble, one even walked off after two laps of racing (all races were 5 laps) having been over 25 seconds behind at the time. This put me straight into the semi final where I won a closer yet still comfortable game against Gunsmith who then won his loser bracket final to play me again on the big stage. Like most of the top level NFS players he used a steering wheel for extra accuracy which I have yet to get my hands on. He was also very comfortable with the track so I knew id be in for a decent challenge.

The video of that race can be found here when you select Need for Speed in the order by game section: http://i34.multiplay.co.uk/vod/
Includes commentary from CGS’s very own Redeye.

There did appear to be a few timing errors during the game, but I was happy to win gaining around 2 seconds a lap against a seasoned NFS player. My mentality during the race was to be conservative and not throw away my lead by pushing it too hard after building up a decent lead.

The Future

Onto Germany in Novemeber, but not without a good deal more practice. I understand there is heaps more work to be done and thankfully there is plenty of time. I will have a few weeks rest, in the meantime the winners from all the other countries will be announced, so I look forward to seeing the quality of the rest of the players from around the world and hopefully get to practice with some. To all those attending WCG events in the coming weeks best of luck. And to all the winners, see you in Germany.