The magic of GameFAQs Forums

It's widely known that GameFAQs forums aren't the most pleasant place to post at it.  The community is full of acerbic, snotty and downright caustic fanboys, one of the worst collective of fanboys on the net.  They're quick to condescend you, dismiss your opinion if it's not popular and berate your poor spelling and grammar.  But sometimes, they're actually pretty helpful.

 

For me, the GF forums contain a mystical power.  Almost all of my gaming career, I post help topics at GF when I get suck in a game.  I'll go back to the game and nine times out of ten, I'll have stumbled across the answer or the hidden path, or find the enemy's weakness almost immediately after I hit submit.  As it turns out, this also applies to racing games. 

 

I'm currently playing Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit on the 360 (bloody fantastic game, that)  and there's a mode I can't stand called Rapid Response.  In this mode, you have to try to beat a time to get gold, but you get penalised for bumping into the wall or traffic; two seconds for a wall collision, three seconds for a traffic collision.  I consider myself decent when it comes to racers.  I hold the Pac-Man symbol by name in Ridge Racer 6, and for anyone who's played it, they should know that's a hell of an accomplishment.  But I've never been too good with avoiding wall collsions or traffic.

 

It's not that it's incredibly difficulty to avoid hitting walls or traffic, when you're not drifting.  But take a drift the wrong way, and you'll end up loosing several seconds in no time.  Also, you can have a perfect run and have it go right down the crapper because of one unavoidable head on collsion.  Criterion loves putting traffic right in your way when you're driting around a bend; cars in both lanes, nothing to do but bend over and take it up the tailpipe!

 

So I went over to GF forums to post a rant topic about this mode.  Guess what happens after I hit submit?  I ended up getting the gold with eight seconds to spare on my very next try!  Yep, it happened again.  GF manages to help me without actually helping me.  Now that, my friends, is what I call magic!