CSR Classics

Hi folks!

Today, I'm going to talk about a different game I've been spending some time on the past days - CSR Classics. Basically, after the somewhat exhausting NFS Lunar New Year event, I wanted have a bit of a break. So let's take a look around in this "free to play" game, and see how we can have fun with it without spending much real world money.

Gameplay

Even for a mobile game, the gameplay is dead simple. My kid is playing "Lego City", which has a section of motorbike drag racing. You press a button to start, and then again to "gear up" when a light goes on. Press the buttons at the right time wins you the game.

This, if we're honest, is exactly how CSR Classics work. Rev the engine so the light goes green. Press "gear up" when the light goes green. Press "nitro" at your leisure. Done. Toddler-grade.

So if it's not the challenging / skilful gameplay, what is interesting about this?

The Good Parts

First thing to note, the graphics. This is, hands down, one of the most beautiful mobile games I've seen. Consistent 50's styling, HD graphics, everything shines and blings. No blocky graphics like we're seeing in NFS these days. Everything is absolutely smooth. Did I mention that the theme is stunning?

The UI integrates well with Android, and doesn't feel like a generic port. Controls are working the usual ways, including the back button. This "native" feel also shows up in resource usage - even on extended play sessions, this game doesn't seem to stress hardware much at all, and in return, doesn't burn much battery or create "the hottest phone on the market", literally.

Loading times between main menu and race are minimal, which is refreshing, especially coming from NFS' minute-long loading screens. Given, the race is extremely simplistic, so there may not be that much to load, but it still feels very quick, compared. Races themselves are usually done in 15s once started, so you can do farming without losing too much time.

Cars

As the name suggests, this is about "classic" cars, and boy are there plenty of them! Collecting and "restoring" is actually the main pull in the game for me.

You can buy cars in two states - "unloved" (rusty and barebones) and "loved" (with nice paint job and some upgrades). Cars also come in different stages / levels, and there's a story mode with some boss characters and a thin narrative - standard stuff. Although I got to say, nicely done to add to the 50's atmosphere.

To give you a bit of an impression, here are the cars I've got so far, after about four days of playing (no real money spent so far). All bought "unloved" (rusty).

The first car, a Chevy Impala. Body fully restored, engine etc. enough to make it to tier 2.

Next up, an old Mercedes. You need a "tiered" car, so once you make it to the next tier, you start with a new one.

For tier 3, which I just started, I chose to go with "The King" - a Plymouth Superbird. It's still pretty rusty, although some body work has been done already.

I got sidetracked by a special event - pickups - so the cash went there for now.

Money Traps

Given the theme of this blog, and the fact that we're talking about free-to-play games here, of course there's the "meta-game" of the developers trying everything in their might to part us from some real-world cash.

For the basics, we've got the "dual currency" trope - we've got cash, which you earn by racing or buy directly, and we've got "gold", which is much harder to come by "naturally". As usual, there are many silly ways how you can spend gold, and only very few that make sense.

There's quite a range of cars that can only be bought with gold. All "loved" cars require gold expense. But there's a decent range of cars through all tiers that can be bought for cash - and we're not talking "two-weeks-of-severe-farming" kind of cash, but very reasonable.

On the high-pressure / psy-ops front, there is a whole range of things I've seen so far.

• "once-in-a-lifetime-offer" : the "agent" character (who we appear to be romantically involved with) regularly pops up with these, giving gold discounts of about 75% on certain cars
• "miss-out" button : The cancel button on all special offers is lovingly called "miss out". Hint, hint.
• "you-need-superpowers-to-get-the-prize" : after you've made it through a free section of a certain race type, you need to start investing gold towards an often vaguely-defined "big prize". Or "miss out".
• "wait-time corruption" : you can speed up delivery of stuff by paying gold.

And a range more. All in all, it's pretty unsubtle, in-your-face-give-me-money. But somehow endearing in its directness, and fair in its limitations so far.

Conclusion

It's a fun little game, with not much of a skill challenge, but very beautiful retro style. Doesn't take much of your time, and has a nice collector trigger. I'll be playing this one for a bit more, and add some strategies etc.

Lunar New Year Event - Aftermath

Hi folks!

The Lunar New Year event has ended. I've been playing quite diligently, making as much use as possible of the free tickets, just to see how far that would get me, and what would be required to complete it.

In the end, I made it quite far, but didn't complete the final run. Here's where I left off.

The Car

From all "red envelopes", I ended up getting blueprints once (that's where the 2 extra come from). Still, I'm 8 short of six stars, and probably another 25 short of a full upgrade.

Since they sell in packs of five, I'd need 35 or seven packs, at a price of 250 gold each, leading to an all-in-all investment of 1750 gold for the blueprints alone (that's more than a monthly gold card would yield).

The remaining races

I actually came pretty close, but would have needed 11 PR points more to even fulfill the requirements for the final race. That's probably 15 tickets worth of farm racing, at 80 gold per 5, adding another 240 gold to the tally of almost 2000 gold. 

The more expensive option would have been to buy out the remaining races, which would have probably cost more than 500 gold in total (guessing here).

All that for a car that is probably at par with the Mercedes AMG, I don't think that's worth it for me at this stage. Note that they're selling the themed AMG for 50 USD real world money at the store, which I think is absolutely outlandish - you can buy whole games for that price.

Anyway, it was a fun event, with challenging races (bloody aura gates, I'm telling ya), but in the end, not worth investing huge amounts of gold in.

I'm back to maxing out my in-game Mercedes AMG, then aiming for the hyper cars in story mode next.

Lunar New Year Event

Hi folks!

A new event started yesterday, in time for the Chinese / Lunar New Year (of the Monkey). I can't quite make out what it's called, but here's what I've seen so far on the event structure.

Prize

The event car we're racing for here is a Jaguar F-Type. It started out as a three-star with uncommon parts and a PR of around 570, if I remember correctly. I'd say that classifies it as a "sports class", around the BMW M4, but below the Nissan GT-R, for example.

Event currencies

Usually, events have their own special currency and "prototype" parts, which convert into regular items afterwards. In this one, the system is a bit more complicated.

While we have an event currency, you don't actually earn it directly from racing. Instead, racing yields "aura", which can be traded for a "red pack" at the price of 60000 aura points. The red pack contains materials, event cash, and (allegedly) blueprints.

The "aura" points accumulate a lot faster than regular cash rewards (I'd say at a 10x rate), so this isn't actually bad value.

There is, of course, the regular event market, where items can be bought for event cash and gold.

Races

The races are surprisingly difficult - I had to re-run some on the first day. This is mainly due to the colour scheme - we've got night races with a dark-red scheme overlayed, so visibility is absolutely minimal. 

In addition to that, there's a new special "obstacle" element - "aura gates". A small section of the track is "open" (about one third), the rest is blocked by a red screen. Hitting the gate gives a nitro refill, hitting the red block screen causes car damage and significant slowdown (similar to a collision).

This makes drifting almost impossible when it occurs, since the gates are on the "ideal" track, so the inner lines in curves, and drifting doesn't give you enough control to keep it tight.

Also, the AI players are obviously on that lane as well, so it gets very crowded very quickly, even on tracks that would normally classify as easy.

Money traps

Here we've got the usual suspects. Car parts and blueprints in the market cost gold, with blueprints trading at a fair 50G per piece (250G for 5). Race skip prices are fair as well so far, but expect them to increase sharply in later levels.

You can get the "red packs" for gold, if you're lacking the aura points, as well.

Strategy

All in all, I'm not overly excited about the Jaguar. There are better cars in the regular game that can be built up without too much effort, like the BMW M4. 

The difficulty seems steep, encouraging buy-outs. As for blueprints, the race series yield 10 (15 for the last). With a requirement of 15 to get to stage 4, I think we'll be ending up at stage 6, short 25 for the full upgrade. I haven't seen any so far in the "red packs", so I wouldn't bet on gold-buying those. If you're after this car, and have the gold stashed, best value is going to be buying in the event market.

Repeat races can give event cash directly, which is valuable, and the aura points add up quickly, so I can definitely recommend doing as many repeats as you can. Tickets have a 30m refill rate, so there should be a fair bit of space, especially in the beginning.

Tournaments

Hi folks!

The tournament races is one area of "Need For Speed" that we haven't taken a closer look at yet, so let's see what we can gain, and where the "traps" are - the hooks to get us to pay real-world money.

Structure

Tournaments are time-limited events that have their own "fuel" - race tickets. The standard amount is five tickets, recharging slowly (about 1h each), although I've seen sudden full recharges occasionally.

Usually, the range of cars is tightly restricted - from "all street cars" to "only Ford Mustangs". There is a single track that's being raced.

Winning a race gives you points, losing a race removes points (usually about 1/4 of the potentially won points).

Ranking

There are 15 ranks or levels. By gaining points, you can rank up to the next level, which gives you an increasingly valuable prize. The higher level you get, the more difficult opponents become, and the more points you need to get to the next level.

Independent of levels there's a "global rank" of all players participating in the tournament. When it ends, you'll get a prize depending on your rank in the global highscore.

Multiplayer

Tournaments are set up as a kind of multiplayer experience - you compete against other players, real people, mixed with the regular AI opponents. But don't be fooled, you're not actually racing live against other people. If you observe the driving behaviour of your opponent, you'll quickly realise that you're racing against the usual AI player, using a real player's car.

To repeat, you're not racing against other people - you're racing against other people's cars, driven by the computer player.

Tournament credit

Usual prizes include cash, visual points, gold for the top ranks and tournament credit. This is a special kind of currency that you can use to shop in the tournament market.

This market is somewhat unique, in that you can't convert gold - you really need the tournament credits to do anything here.

The market contains similar items to the black market - materials, parts, blueprints. With one exception: There are two "tournament cars" in the game, which you can only get by buying the respective blueprints in the tournament market.

Tournament Cars

These cars are the "Toyota Supra" and the "Ferrari F40". The Toyota is especially important since the Tuner Trials change, because you need this car to race for rare (blue) conversion kits, which you need in turn to upgrade rare (5-star) to epic (6-star) parts.

Fortunately, you only need 15 blueprints for the basic Supra, and it's just about enough to race for kits, with a bit of skill. Before the Tuner Trials, the price was at 300 credits per blueprint, which has since been reduced to 166 (500 for 3). So make sure you save up some for this car, as you need it for progressing through the game.

That aside, the parts are usually hugely overpriced (ranking in the thousands), while you can often grab a bargain material for 10 or 20 credits.

Highscore

But let's get back to the highscore list. If I'm diligently racing (making use of most of the free race tickets), and provided that I have a car to get me through to racing till the end, I can normally make it into the top 200.

This is a far cry from the top 25, which is where you usually start getting gold prizes. So we'd have to spend a fair amount of gold on ticket refills (90G for another 5), or real-world money on the game's VIP system, giving us more tickets at some points.

This is obviously the hook to get us to pay up - competitiveness, and once we start spending gold in larger quantities, we're pressured to make it to the top to "recover our losses". As usual, it helps to be aware of how these things work, in order not to get pulled into them.

Given that the game is keeping a lot of state offline, I wouldn't be too surprised if the top people were using cracked versions to provide enough gold for tickets. Can't prove that, of course - at some point, I'm going to run a trial to see if it's actually possible to make a "net profit" out of buying tickets.

Strategies

So, now that we understand how the system works, what's the best way of getting some fun out of it, without unnecessarily reaching into our wallet?

First up, compete, but don't gamble. Use your free tickets to get as much as you can out of the tournament. You'll find that there's actually quite some fun in seeing how far you can push.

Racing

Since you drive the same track over and over, you can try to optimise your time. In the beginning, you'll often have a more powerful car than your opponent, so take note of the time you're making at the end of the race, and the difference towards the opponent's time.

Over the course of the tournament, you should be able to get 500ms to a second better than your initial time, by timing nitro boosts correctly, driving tight corners and whatever other tricks you have.

Once the opponent's car gets close to yours in terms of PR, your best bet is to start driving dirty. You can predict the AI player's position, since they drive "shortest distance / no drift". Push them into the track side, close their corners, have them rear-end you - lots of fun ways to keep them from winning, even if their car is equal or better than yours.

Choice of opponent

You have three choices - an opponent from your level, from one level up, or two levels up - someone from two levels ahead gives over twice as much points as someone from your current level.

Here, keeping an eye on the opponent's time pays off - you'll know if you can still keep racing for maximum points, or if you're no longer standing a chance.

In the end, like all other features, this is supposed to be fun - so treat it as such. Happy racing!

Blackridge Spirit - End Result

Hi folks!

After a month of furious racing, the Blackridge Spirit event has ended. For me, it has been such a close call! In the end, I didn't have the power on the BMW M4 to make it through:

My BMW had a final PR of 675 - in the end, I've been lagging too far behind with upgrades. I had to buy out the second-last block (again, very close, just 10 behind the required PR), which got my stash down to 500 gold.

I've been racing to the last one - made it through race 12, even against a PR difference of close to 100, with all tricks I could come up with. But in the end, buying out the last race for 15 blueprints would have cost 750 gold.

That's a fair price in my book, and I would have paid, if I had the stash. But I wasn't going to pay real-world money - $15 to get enough gold isn't worth a single star on an event car for me.

It's these kind of situations where the game can exert maximum pressure on you, and it's important to take a step back, analyse the situation objectively, and judge if it's worth the price. For me, I could imagine some way more interesting things I could buy for $15.

What's next

All in all, this was a fun event, but quite exhausting, especially that it hit my weaker, secondary cars. So for now, I'm left with a three-star LaFerrari, and will continue where I left off - upgrading my Mercedes AMG all the way, to see if it gets me into levels 15 and 16 of the story mode.

I'll need the Viper as well soon, to farm the Tuner Trials for legendary materials, and I'll need to grow my gold stash back, so I'll be having a break from the high-intensity events for a bit.

Congratulations to everyone who made it through to the final stage, and to completion!

Blackridge Spirit Final Week

Hi folks!

The final week for the Blackridge Spirit event has started. If you've completed all races so far, you'll already have the three-star LaFerrari. This last one is to get it up to stage four - and we still don't know where we will eventually get the final blueprints.

The car for this one is going to be the BMW M4 F82. Here's what I'm starting with:

Now, you might notice that this one isn't quite as staged up as my previous ones. The reason for that is my M4 Razor event car - since it could substitute for most things so far (car series, tournaments), there wasn't really a reason to spend time on the regular M4.

Which is now coming back to bite me, since in this one case, I can't use the M4 Razor. Bollocks. Given that the previous week ended up with a 739 PR requirement, I'm fully expecting to have to burn through my gold stash to buy this one out.

Ah well, that's what I got the stash for in the first place :)

Bridge instakill

Hi folks!

there's a pretty deadly combination in some race tracks - jump ramps and low-hanging bridges. Be very careful when you're racing there, because hitting a bridge is an instakill, unlike hitting sides of the track or pretty much any other obstacle head-on.

You can hit an oncoming car at 400 km/h, but it'll bounce off your hood, cost you 25% health, and slow you down quite a bit. Hit a bridge while in the air, and you're toast.

You can even hit a stationary obstacle, like a wall, head on - which will reduce your speed to almost zero, and most likely cost you the victory - but it won't do much more than put a few scratches on the paintjob. Not with bridges, though. Bridges are vicious.

The danger here are the jump ramps, especially in combination with nitro boosting. Always head dead-straight across the ramps, even the slightest spin or drift will edge-case the physics engine and send you skywards.

Doing that without a bridge can actually be quite hilarious, especially if you can manage to still win the race. Gives a bit of cash for airtime, too. But bridges kill. Beware.