Sunday, 18 July 2021

GTA Online - Cars, Bikes, Boats, Planes, Friends and a Sense of Purpose

Hello! well it has been a while, probably the longest ever time between posts, 8 months that's more than half a year. I was just thinking of doing another post and then checked how long it had been and wow that was a looong time. Well, a lot has happened since the last post. I now have NBN, and I've started streaming! FYI I now have my Twitch and Youtube channel link in the top right of my blog. When I finally decided to get NBN it took a very long time to get it installed in my apartment and since then I have been doing a lot of work streaming and building my youtube channel. Hopefully, I get more chances to update soon.

Now that's a good line of cool cars

What made me want to make a new blog post is that recently I have finally found a crew in GTA Online that does car meets on PC, which I had been looking for for a long time. I had made a post in the GTA Online Facebook group I was in and received a message from a member of the 'Killer Clowns' crew whose I will refer to by his GTA name "Mr Miyagi". He was also an Aussie but the guild itself was mostly European. So I went on to their Discord and signed up and saw that there was a car meet coming up soon and it was for offroad! This was awesome so I immediately started planning the time and what vehicle I would take. I found that the meets were scheduled at night British Summer Time (BST) which meant it was going to be pretty damn early, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. So at 5:40am on a Sunday I arose and logged into GTA to take part. We met at the car lot out in Sandy Shores and I rolled  in and lined up with my orange Injection Dune Buggy, which I will admit looked pretty damn small compared to the other cars and trucks which were a mixture of big 4x4 trucks, one person even had the Scarab from Arena War which did pretty well with its tracks. So we set off down the road and met up at the lighthouse on the western coast and lined up again. 

The lineup on the cliff near the lighthouse. Some of those wheels aren't suitable for offroad lol.

I learned pretty quickly how these meets worked. We met up in one arena, then traveled to the next area and stopped for more photos, this time we stopped on the edge of a cliff! By the time Miyagi rolled in and everyone was present we started off down a first road and then, of course, my GTA crashed. When I got back the group had finished the route around Mount Gordo and were on their way to Mount Chiliad. I decided that I might go a bit bigger in my vehicle choices so I decided to use my Australian-themed Marshal which worked really well as it has an Australian flag on the back. The monster was powerful and had lots of grip which made short work of the steep hills and ravines we were climbing up, in fact the only downside for Marshal is that's it's quite slow compared to other off-road vehicles but speed was not an issue at all for this run.


Convoy!

So we drove up and down the mountain and then along the beach and the swamp before finishing at Stab City. Apart from getting flooded a few times I went really well, the Monster truck made things really easy. The next part of the meet was motorcycles and I picked my favorite bike, the Nightblade. The bike meet was ok but the offroad one was far superior as we all moved slow and we all moved together. In any case I had a great time and took lots of photos and recorded the whole session. This was great this was what I had been looking for for a while. Playing with my friends Moofs and Tewdric and others is fun but the problem I always had is that I'd pretty much played until I'd done almost everything the game had to offer and bought all these cool things but most of the time whatever we did didn't give us a chance to use our custom vehicles. Yes when doing missions you could often drive to the location with your own vehicle or when doing things like doing CEO crate missions you could use your own car too but most of the time you were driving around in what was required for the mission like trucks or post-op vans or helicopters or your Oppressor Mk2

My edited music video of the Water Meet

Most of the time to use my custom cars I did classic land races but were hard to get going unless it was the weeks where they were 3x money where I found that lots of people started them. I did try to do the occasional car meet but impromptu car meets never really work, especially in a random lobby. Even the meets I did with other friends were small and short-lived and also were prone to people wrecking them. The best car meets are well organised and most importantly in private invite-only lobbies.

We're the self-Preservation Society!

Over time I have attended another 5 meets with two of them being organised by your truly. I ran a small vehicle offroad meet and roam where we used Dirtbikes, Quad Bikes, and Buggies and we raced haphazardly through mountain passes. And a water meet and roam where we bombed the rivers and sailed the seas with Jet Ski's, Speedboats and Yachts. Other meets that were organised were Movie-themed, Air Land and Sea, James Bond, and a second offroad meet where I used my APC. Using the APC was great fun as it was amphibious so I had no worries of being flooded. I even had to do two rescue missions where crew members were stuck at the bottom of cliffs and I had to ferry them out of there.

Full video of the second meet.

I am so glad I have found this community and that I have a chance to show off my custom vehicles, Grand Theft Auto is the best game to do this due to the variety of vehicles and customisation you can do. I have spent a lot of time recording and editing videos of the meets out of a passion for these events since I saw the very cool video by Atomic. I've been trying to record using the Rockstar Editor but it can only save to your C Drive where I don't have very much space but I'll see what I can do. I need to work on editing mine down a bit and getting them more precise.You can see all of these videos on my Youtube channel.

Atomic's excellently edited video of the first meet. You can see me!

I just wish now that I could find the same thing in the Crew 2 :) 

JD


We got ourselves a Convoy!