MTM2.com

Oh neat a new track, cant wait.

Mmmm gee that snowman looks familiar

is this a big barrel of jack daniels by any chance?

It's both. A new track and a barrel of Jack Daniels.

It does - and someone has really impeccable timing to boot

For some reason I don't know what anybody is talking about. All I know is I'm suddenly feeling mighty thirstee.

They certainly do D2S.

Here you go, enjoy!!

good looking modles and the little lights on the fence post nice

Well, I finally tried it, and as usual, as with all Mal's stuff, I loved it.

Killer textures, great layout, its a Rally... need I say more? No great race track makers left, if there is, no one is making them, if I see another lame drag track that all look the same, I think I may puke.

So thank god you made this one, I've been waiting a long time for a decent race track, and I just love the title of it.

I urge others that make drag tracks to make some race tracks, I have ideas if you can't think of anything. I have tons of ideas, or I should just learn to do it myself.

As always, excellent work my friend, and a permanent place in my Podini. Now if we could just get that guy that made Deja Vu to make some more stuff... That was his best one yet, I wish he'd make another one just like it.

well rep fan, there's a whole other community aside from here. us draggers make, well, drags. levi has been making some good circuits lately, you can always keep pushing mal to make another, and there are a couple random people making them. us draggers have tried but not really come up with a good product. i will be making a circuit for my league's world finals, but i doubt it'll be any good. just go back and race all the old, fun ones.

Repfan, I feel exactly the same as you about those drags. There are practically no circuits and rallies left, and they're what really made mtm2 great. I think the drags should be moved into a separate section specifically made for them.

Anyhow, I'll try this track as soon as I can. From the description it sounds good!

Love this track Mal really fun to run on. New textures and models as always look fantastic.

I love circuit racing just as much as I love drag racing. It really is a shame that more drag track people don't take the time to build circuit tracks. I'm workin on one right now on and off it isn't anything like this but is a circuit none the less.

This map is INCREDIBLY well made. Much better than any map made by microsoft. Nice models and great terraining. Awesome job on the banked turns and the tunnel at the beginning. I dont think any map can compare to how much time and effort was put into making the actual track.

Only problem is, I found the actual racing to be long and boring. Most of the race is just pressing the acceleration and letting the truck go for you, very little breaking is needed. Steering only actually gets fun towards the end of the race and theres only 1 or 2 good jumps.

Maybe the map isnt really my style though, I like Torture pit type maps with big jumps and fast turns on rough terrain.

Overall though, very well done map. Keep up the good work!

Malibu strikes again, with another slobber-knocker of a track!! I just downloaded it last night, ran a few before I went to bed, and a few laps just a bit ago. This bute has a wide open race sufrace, which will be a lot of fun online (when there is players), and beautiful texture work that's very easy on the eyes. This is a high speed-burn kind of a track, where keeping momentum is key, and the line you drive can greatly affect how much "big-mo" you carry out of corners. The map is very sweet looking, with brillantly placed checkpoints. I have been scouring for cuts but so far have not found any. The wide sweeping banked corners are alot of fun, but some skill is required to navigate them with as much speed as possible, and missing your entry to these can really slow you down. The map also has a good flow, and only takes a few laps to learn your way around. But there is just enough tricky sections in it to make it unpredictable lap after lap. And it's not all about pushing the "loud pedal" down, and turning left and right. I found that some throttle and brake finesse here and there, can bring your lap time down. I really feel that this track will cater to any level of driver versus another to have a great, competitive race on this one.

Mal has once again shown that he is still on top of his track making game, and has upped the bar once more. This one is a must download track guys! I plan on running this some more, but for now:

Well, I tried it out. My first opinion was that it was cool, but I saw a few things that have changed this idea. My new opinion is that the track is

AWESOME

Mal, you're a genius. The tunnel was cool, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The first thing that got my attention was your windmill. I've seen one or two others in mtm2 but this one is by far the best. Anyone wonders why there aren't too many objects, I encountered NO lag whatsoever.

I've never seen a kitchenware factory in a race track before. The second thing I really enjoyed was the semi-transparent (!) water high up in the mountains. It did not use default mtm2 water and can't cause the Noah Phenomenon.

And the biggest thing I saw - a total attention grabber, and I watched this in amazement for several minutes - was that ground-texture Rubik's cube which solves itself, expands, squishes, and becomes messed up again. Also interesting was the platform it sat on. If I were new to mtm2 and its limitations, I would swear it was done with a form of groundboxes, at least until I would lean that groundboxes can only be square lol.

I will be running it again, and in the meantime it's strictly forbidden to remove it from the POD.INI list.

Great job!

I too was very impressed by this track. But coming from Mal, I should have known that it would be nothing short of perfection.

I ran it 1 lap with sparse graphics, then decided to switch to complex, so I could see what I missed. On the 2nd time through I noticed the Rubic's cube. I had to sit there and watch it like Mat said. I also sat for a while watching what looked like a monorail expecting a high tech bullet train to come flying down the rail. But nothing came, maybe what I saw wasn't a monorail.

Overall though, an excellent track. Thankyou Malibu.

Better wait at the rail a little longer - what you saw was the track for a rocket-powered cow. Perhaps it's not set to moving - follow the rail for a while and you'll come to it.

Big Whiskey
Mal releasing a track is always a special event to me. I remember when back in 2002 I started browsing mtmg.com for add-ons. Not knowing where to start I randomly picked half a dozen files from the track list, which was in alphabetic order by default. The download took considerable time in that pre-DSL era and after that I was soon convinced that it was not worthwhile to ever come back to this site. Apparently it was the meeting place for would-be track builders incapable of making decent circuits: everywhere misaligned textures, landscapes looking like chessboards, triangular mountains, horrible colors, invisible walls, trees set to collide-facing, etc, etc, etc. The last of my downloads was Arctic Wasteland, a title even less promising than the moderately fascinating tracks I had tested so far. What could I seriously expect from a guy calling himself Malibu350?? Five minutes later I granted Malibu the status of "track-making genius", a status he has never lost since. It was sheer luck that he released a track with a name beginning with „A“ that year, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, lol.

At this point I can see some shaking their heads and asking: Is this guy writing his memoires or what? Why in this forum? Why in this thread? And who cares anyway?
Well, these persons may not know professor Pescolo, dean of Track Reviewer's School. He keeps saying:

According to his standards my introduction is rather on the short side but I'll nevertheless move right now to the heart of the subject.

The track gets its name from the astronomical observatory you drive around. The building is extremely well designed (I love buildings) with texture work up to par. Actually the Big Whiskey Observatory is so beautiful you almost feel ashamed to vandalize the lawn around it with your monster truck. Well, almost.
And of course if you haven’t done it yet, make sure you see the Rubik cube.

Being easy on the eyes is one thing, but being fun to race another. How does Big Whiskey do in that respect?
It is a wide, relatively smooth and over 4 minutes long high-speed track. All of this gives you a pleasant feeling of space. The track looks easy and in some respect it is. Finding your way around the track is painless, you don’t have to worry about finding short cuts, and there are indeed no places where you have to wonder how to get through without crashing. But it is not that easy to be fast. Breaking the 4:10 barrier will require some practice laps. And to get down to UltraMax's range (4:07.85) some more.
Let us look at some of the driving challenges Mal has spiced up his track with:

The tight turn at CP3
It is not obvious to figure out what the best line could be, and then it’s still not obvious to drive it. Because of the entry speed of well over 100 MPH the timing of steering and throttle control must be right on the spot. Any correction here will result in a significant loss of speed and time.

On the way to CP4 there is an interesting jump where the truck invariably tends to get sideways after landing. You better hurry to point the nose of your truck into the right direction for the most slippery corner of the whole track to follow.

An innocuous looking banked 270° turn around a pond. It is tricky because of the high entry speed and the following uphill section which penalizes low exit speed.

A series of strategically placed bumps you better know, like the one before the right-hand bend between CP13 and 14.

It is true that between the challenging parts you are given some rest while cruising on smooth straights.
Pushing like a maniac and taking every risk will gain you no more than 5 seconds per lap compared to a reasonably safe & sane drive. This means the first priority in a race is to avoid crashes and other incidents, the second to be steady. Because once the guy in front has a 10 sec time cushion to manage, he will drive the baby home (unless the remaining race distance is really long compared to MTM2 standards).

On the other hand the range of possible gear sets should provide additional thrill during online races. Completely different settings allow similar total lap times, but with very different section times. While 2000ms will not be very pleasant to drive on the medium-speed and uphill sections (e.g. CP6 to CP7) the speed difference with a plain vanilla 1600ms is quite spectacular on the fast straights. Speaking for myself, I can drive low 4:08 with ms1700 to ms2000. In the end, the chosen setting is merely a matter of individual preferences and driving styles. I thus expect races to happen between people being faster on different sections of the track.
[Hint for newbies: try 2000ms and a truck like Overkill. The long gear and the long wheel base of the truck both make it easier to control the slides without losing much momentum.]


Looking forward to do some serious racing on this track

Verdict:
Golden Antler Award

Well done, rocketalces. And I was thinking about ol' professor emeritus Pescolo just the other day too ;-)



If I had to add anything I think I'd just admire the texture work which includes the widest 45 degree roads made to date, and some nice terrain work, and a great layout overall. And almost every single model brings extra meaning with them from a wide range of sources... that I think would require an annotated gloassary to grasp some of the finer subleties.

Yes, indeedy, this one's a beaut, that she be.

Those are some mighty kind words, thank you very much.

I didn't include a readme with this track, my bad because Wint is the reason it looks so good... all I did was copy what he'd already done before.