The Grind - Slow but Steady Progress on Forza

Yes, I am still having a lot of fun.

The Toyota Supercar - The Lexus LFA

It’s been a pretty good week for gaming, and I have been able to complete another series of the Career (well, I do still have the exhibition race to claim my Lexus LFA Supercar.

To get here, I needed to finish the German Rivals showcase, and the JDM¹ series.

On the way though, I have begun using Rivals mode to both learn tracks, and to hone my skills.

Probably not a surprise, but the key to speed is to be smooth, to modulate the brake and accelerator, and using the manual transmission to ensure you are putting the power to the ground the most efficiently.

Simple, right?

Not so much. It is very humbling to load up a replay of a world record lap, to see how the true experts race. And I suck.

But this is not all bad, because the woodshedding that I have been doing has made me suck less². And that does translate to better finishing positions.

Huh, sort of like in real life. There aren’t any shortcuts to putting in the work. Whooda thunk it?

1. JDM is carspeak for “Japanese Domestic Market”. This class of cars are things like the Nissan GT-R, the Mitsubishi 3000 series, and the Mazda RX-8, and probably others that I can’t remember. I chose the extremely well rounded Nissan GT-R, a pretty killer car.

2. A long time ago, when I was a far more marketing focused product manager, I was in a meeting with our leadership team, and the engineering director was doing a deep dive on our new product versus our main competitor, and basically both our products had shortcomings, but we had fewer that made us the superior choice, even with our warts. I blurted out: “Oh, so the strategy and message is ‘we suck less’” and the phrase was coined. I was pissed that this was the output of 2 years of development, but we still failed to meet our goals. But the leaders loved the phrase. Weird.

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