Grand Theft Auto Online - the content creator.
"Oh come ye worldly whelps and build ye dreams to be shared and enjoyed by the thousands" they say.
I'm one of the whelps and I built a dream that is known and loved amongst my tight circle of friends. The dream is a simple ridge riding man's dream, a race that encompasses all that he does of a GTA Online day; ride them ridges - http://rsg.ms/c073581
For those of you unfamiliar with 'Ridge Riding' let me briefly explain: Ridge Riding: The act of driving your vehicle (preferably a bike) successfully along any kind of natural ridge - busting mad insane tricks whilst ridge riding greatly improves your credibility as a ridge rider.
Ridge: A ridge is a geological feature consisting of a chain of mountains or hills that form a continuous elevated crest for some distance.
Of course the challenge of riding a ridge is that oft-times you are riding along an uneven surface with prominent drops either side. One false move and your sliding down a mountain/hill/cliff. The second challenge, brought on by sliding off a ridge, is getting back on it. Too fast and you'll over-shoot it and end up launching off the other side, too slow and you'll never see the top.
But this isn't all a motorcycle cross-country tight-rope walk - it's jumps, sprints, tarmac, short-cuts, action-cams, traps and obstacles - natural or not.
Ridge Riders II (http://rsg.ms/c073581) is open for 16 players to pit it out in a point-to-point, motorcycles and small off-roaders only, race starting on the bridge overlapping the north-eastern highway and ending at the bottom of Mount Josiah on the western shore of the Alamo Sea. Skirt the edges of the Vinewood Bowl and the Sisyphus Theater, glide across a grassy plateau and enjoy the Vinewood Hills Sign & Sites, master a precarious right turn through security gates and toll booths at the Galileo Observatory, follow the hiker's trail over a ruffian's home-made car & bus jump and tackle sharp cliff-side corners and a colossal down-hill run to over-road ramp jump complete with multiple hazards, trick routes and large rolling Orange Ball. Then follow a series of ridges and steep drops before finally making a last-tarmac sprint across the Fort Zancudo Approach bridge, though watch your speed kids, no one likes to end up in a pile of pipes.
Having conquered all of the prior events you are now faced with two final challenges; to first scale Mount Josiah, up an old narrow goat-track, complete with mandatory, irritating old and decayed fencing, something that requires true up-hill ridge-riding mastery, to reach it's peak. And then secondly, to descend it's left-face, offering you multiple routes, down a series of steep drops, valleys and natural jumps. An adrenaline junkie's wet nightmare that'll see a pole position hero turned high-speed tree-collision zero.
This race is about showcasing pure off-road, ridge-riding talent, tricks, precision and endurance. This is about speed as much as it is hammering that handbrake. This is about backflips as much as it is wheelies.
I didn't just randomly place markers and hope that a sick race would ensue, I had to ride ridges far and wide to find the perfect line, the perfect balance of on & off-road. To find wide open stretches and tiny two-lane paths. This isn't just a pray & spray of random objects peppered about a context-less map, these are plausible items placed, in your way, in plausible situations. Offering as many traps as there are short-cuts and chances to bust a mad move - it's a race that asks you to come back again so that you can do it better. Offering a different experience every time, where you mastered that second ridge once you'll fail the next time but you'll hit that secret jump perfectly and slap several racers on the road-works s-bend.
Each section offers new challenges, pros and cons, allowing drivers of different talents to excel at different points throughout, though all and all, Ridge Riders II is a solid race from beginning to end that will challenge hardened mountain scalers and Sunday drivers alike.
Though, on that note, don't assume that this is pure "FFS WTF!?!?" for either a successful five minutes or agonising ten, this is an easily do-able race, unless your just looking to go round and round the dog track like a bitch, in which case don't even look at my ridge.
I ask you take the challenge and enjoy racing something very different to everything else on the market - this has been a collaborative race-build that's taken many evenings of constant testing, racing and editing to perfect. It's offered me and friends hours and hours of entertainment though we all still hunger for the day when we'll see a full-house - 16 players head-to-head.
Make it happen.