Jowan: Designated driver.

On the first day of the Expo, I noticed that on the ridiculously expensive Alienware computers ESL were using, people were playing Trackmania Nations Forever, a free game. I found this slightly amusing, and moved on.

On the Sunday, the Expo was less crowded. We found that there were competitions open to the public on the ESL stage. As the only person in the group who plays Trackmania, I was peer pressured into entering, even though I hadn’t played for months and thought I’d be really bad.

Maybe it would be a good idea to explain Trackmania, which is a free game, available to download on Steam or at http://www.trackmania.com. It is a semi-cartoonish racing game which I used to play a lot. It can become quite addictive trying to beat your best times, and that’s just single player. Multiplayer games become even more exciting and obviously more competitive. There is a huge selection of servers to play on, each of which can have different tracks. The inclusion of an easy-to-use track creator means that the possibilities are endless. Tracks range from small acrobatic tricks which, when done right, can be finished in seconds, to extremely long races with jumps and loops which might take several minutes.

Jumping a gap on an acrobatic track

There are two main game modes that I play. The first gives a time limit in which you get unlimited attempts at a track and the person with the best time at the end wins. In the second mode the tracks are raced in rounds, with everyone starting at the same time and the top positions in each race being given points until someone reaches a certain number of points to win.

I sat down in the chair as Racer 04, and started the warm-up rounds. As it turned out, I hadn’t entirely lost my touch, although I know I would’ve done better a year ago. After a few decent practice rounds, the competition started. I somehow managed to flip the car on the first race, which didn’t get me off to the best of starts, but after that I started doing well. I quickly made it to third place, behind the ESL Trackmania champion darkY, and Racer 07. We played three tracks, A01, A07  and C01.

The last section of track A01

On the second track, I apparently got the fastest public time of the whole Expo, which pleased me. On a few occasions, darkY failed to win a race, because he was giving us ridiculous head starts. This made myself and Racer 07 the only two public gamers to beat him at the Expo. In the end, I came third overall, despite a worrying start to the third track, and Racer 07 won the t-shirt on offer as a prize. Not a bad showing from the MTTG Trackmania representative, as I now am. It was only after finishing that I found out Racer 07 was a Blur rep, whose job is a racing game.

The event went out live on ESL TV, but I’ve failed to track down a recording. If anyone finds one, please post a link in the comments. I got mentioned in the commentary a few times, along with my ‘fan club’ of other MTTG members, who were made at some point to do a Mexican wave. [We do a damn fine Mexican wave -Tom]

I have now been convinced to enter the amateur ESL Trackmania league. I’m hoping custom paintwork is allowed, so I can use the MTTG car I’ve created and start advertising the site to a wider audience.

MTTG Car

Also, I noticed that the deadline for entering the amateur Counterstrike league is coming up. Fancy entering ‘olawd’, anyone?

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