Hot Wheels Unleashed

I'm having a real hard time with the Breathtaking Race track towards the top of the map. I can believe that there's no rubberbanding, but I'm starting to wonder if there's a dose of what I'm going to term "3rd lap fuckery". Seems like every time the track splits I go from ahead to behind, or get caught on a bump and flip over, always after 2 normal laps that went perfectly.

On the upside, all these repeated laps mean I've found a nice little shortcut that shaves off a couple of seconds and looks cool too.

Yeah, I toyed with the idea of just leaving it AFK in multiplayer and coming back a few hours later to check. Didn't do it in the end even if half of the pack in any lobby seemed to have the same idea.

I was of the impression that multiplayer AFKers are doing it to earn 40 coins per race, rather than just to refresh the shop. Even considered it myself but I was worried about getting banned as we've no idea how trigger-happy the devs are for that sort of thing.

I completed all the secrets and decided to have a proper go at the multiplayer. But this isn't a proper go- I'm in a lobby where over half of the players are AFK, and the other half are consistently voting for the "drag race" player-created tracks that are finished in 5 seconds. Great for earning coins fast, but not so good for an actual fun time.

Accidentally bought the Xbox One version of this instead of the Series X one. What a fucking scummy thing to do. I don't suppose there's a modestly priced upgrade?

Got a very quick go on this last night, seems right up my alley.
Only thing I don't like is those fucking adaptive triggers (PS5), they just seem permanently pushed out here and do nothing other than make it harder to accelerate. Am I missing something?

Update- there's been an update and they seem to have fixed this. I've been in a Quick Match lobby for an hour, and the player created tracks are all a decent length. Some of them are really creative and good too.

That scorpion race was a right fucker.

The scorpion and the pterodactyl both took a few attempts, but I'd still trade their poison or whirlwind hazards for those godforsaken spider sections peppered throughout the game. Every time I think I've mastered the technique to avoid their web-spit, one catches me out and I go from first to fourth in the last lap.

And it really takes the piss that you can only unlock time trials (with ghosts to follow) once you've already beaten the track on your own.

Well this has been a journey

Turns out you can only apply either your own ghost or the absolute best ghost in time attack. And the best ghost for this particular track (and, I suspect, many others), was the one that found the exploit where you boost off the side, skip a huge section, and land shortly before the finish line.

So, I followed the ghost, and completed the track in 40 seconds rather than the 1m20 that was proving so hard. And now I feel dirty.

The final section of time trails to the north is balls hard.

Ok, using air-boosting to skip large sections of track is actually quite fun.

Edit - for the avoidance of doubt, I am not doing this in multiplayer

It's not quite NFTs and crypto, but I wonder what the energy cost is of all the people leaving their consoles running 24/7 to harvest Hot Wheels coins from the multiplayer. Because it's a LOT of people. Every lobby is like 4 racers and 8 harvesters now.