Silly Trials

Been playing a fair bit of Trials lately. Motorcycle platforming! Lots of raging involved! And why the hell is the game speed tied to your fps? There's also the freezing/stuttering when trying to connect to the servers for Frontier, which is mildly annoying when you're resuming the game from putting the device to sleep/switching between apps. Still, it's mobile Trials and it plays well enough. There's just no pressure related throttle control, which would have been incredibly useful for the harder tracks.

Nabbed a copy of Trials Evolution and Trials Fusion... It took a while, but I finally unlocked the Extreme tracks for Evolution. Still working on it for Fusion, mostly because of the fps issue I have. Hardware isn't strong enough to keep a steady 60, which results in insane frame drops and slowdown (and subsequent speed spikes) that are difficult to recover from. Even weirder is the game rendering much faster than usual for Evolution. On some tracks, it'll spike to 80+ fps at specific portions of the track, making it extremely difficult to land a jump off a ramp while doing a backflip (and you're forced to flip, so eh...). But other than that quibble, it runs pretty smoothly. Now to actually make it past the first few jumps on those Extreme tracks, and to get that fault counter and time down for on the final Hard track. Almost ran out of time and faults to work with as the game actually reminded me about it. Had about 330 faults and a completion time of just over 23 minutes. Then the game crashed while trying to save the replay in webM format. It's actually pretty terrible at trying to save in that format since the quality is severely degraded and with frame drops everywhere. Oh well. That just means there's no video proof of my epic failure at playing Trials.

For Fusion... Eh... Can't even play the Hard tracks without being a complete failure. The frame inconsistency is just too much and too difficult to attempt to compensate for. The game's pretty though. Except for those shadows. I stared at those shadows for who knows how long because of how bad they were. In a way, I understand that shadow and lighting calculations are extremely costly, so corners had to be cut. But on the other hand, why does it still look so bad when cranked up to the highest settings on the PC? I think I still prefer how Evolution looked. Better than those warehouses! "Look, we're outside now!"

On a side note, the credits for Evolution are hilarious. Maybe I'll type them up in a separate post. It talks about the Bailout button with unusual detail and the marketing director making funny comments about it. And as per Ubisoft tradition, the credits are pretty long, but that's also because they included the Trials HD credits along with the Evolution staff.

And on another side note, did not know that you could attempt to speed run Trials. Thought I'd take a peek, and what do you know? Trials Evolution made an appearance at AGDQ13 and Fusion was present at SGDQ14. The Evolution player was pretty meh though. Faulting on some of the easier tracks. It would have been far more impressive if it were done like how the Fusion run was: unlocking every bike and passing every track with as few faults as possible. Instead, the rider used the Scorpion and Phoenix from the start. There was a bit of navigation fail, but that's kinda the game's fault as well. Not the best loading menus they made.

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So... I noticed something kinda funny with the slots. Nothing on GFAQs last I checked. Playing on an iPad Mini, so I don't know how different some of the steps are with other devices. When I first started playing, you could fast forward the timer just from manipulating the clock. Still works on gas, so I'm not complaining too much.

1. Make sure you have an internet connection.
2. Disable the "Set Automatically" option in "Date & Time"
3. Make sure that you update the game on this change (if you're signed into Game Center, it'll say "Welcome back, *insert username*)
4. Go back to the settings and change the time to something else.
5. Update the game on the change
6. Go back to the settings and change the time to something a few hours ago.
7. Update the game, play the slots.
8. When you finish the challenge and and collect your rewards (or lack thereof), swipe to change apps, then back to Trials Frontier (or just begin the swipe change but don't actually change apps). That should reduce the timer to 0.

Of course, to fully take advantage of this... exploit, you still need to be able to do something about those challenges.

ETA: And it looks like RedLynx has fixed it for their 2.2.0 update. Kind of an annoying and weird update too: decreased the number of Gems required for another spin while increasing the time between spins to 1.5 hours.