Drifting With EA – A Community Report!

16 2

Hello Blog’ites!

Earlier this month, EA’s Dan Sheridan got in touch with me and asked me to fly out to Ireland to take part in his SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED promo event. Unfortunately (and after seeing the pictures, regrettably) I couldn’t make it. But my loss was forum member loonytoon1982’s gain – so I sent him as my advocate to the event, on the proviso that he wrote up a diary and took loads of photos.

…Which he did! And here they are. Enjoy!

Drifting with EA - A Community Report

My name’s Chris (better known as loonytoon1982). I’m a member of the PlayStation Community and, on March 25th, I had the pleasure of attending the Shift 2 Unleashed Pro Academy Day! I’m here to tell you all about my experience.

This was a promo event for EA’s SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED, but it was also an opportunity for Irish drift race driver Darren “D-Mac” McNamara to unveil his new car for 2011.

To celebrate this, journalists and gamers from throughout the UK and Ireland were treated to a day of Pro Academy drift lessons. The day began with me setting off just before 9am to head towards the Weston Executive Airfield, just outside Dublin. Following a short briefing about what the day would entail, we had a brief introduction with D-Mac explaining what drift techniques we would be learning.

Drifting with EA - A Community Report

Well, by “quick” I mean they did a few doughnuts… then it was our turn.

When I finally got going I spun the car out a few times before perfecting the technique. I lost count of how many times the car went around and around before being told to stop… I did a few more first though before applying the brakes…. How could I resist!?

After lunch it was more of the same, I did get my hands on SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED, which I was very impressed with! In the great spirit of things, I even earned a trophy.

I also had the opportunity to have a one on one interview with D-Mac himself. For this I asked our OPC forum members and my followers on Twitter if they had questions that they would like me to ask. I didn’t have time to ask many, but here they are!

Drifting with EA - A Community Report

KAP asked:
From the look of the view inside the cars in-game, it looks incredible and Slightly Mad Studios seemed like they’ve pulled off a sense of speed when racing. How much input did you have on the cockpit view of the game?

D-Mac: “I came into the process slightly late in the development of it. My input into Need For Speed kinda came after I played the game. It was just a complete one off kind of thing yet I managed to beat half the team who were playing it for ages and ages. So that kinda got them interested in me and I gave them some input into what I thought of it last October and my opinion of it happened to be shared by a couple of other people. They took it away and changed it a bit based on that. Not too much but not too little.”

What features are you most excited about?
“I did a video in Vancouver about 4 weeks ago for the autolog, me and another race car driver, a guy that I have just met through EA, we’re friends now but we sat down in two separate rooms with a Logitech wheel and played for 2 hours. They wanted to make a video for their official website for it. After the 2 hours of playing we had done 4,000 drifts in it so I’m looking forward to getting back to the autolog and seeing how I’ve improved with that.”

broly98 asked:
What kind of car do you drive every day, and what is your preferred drift car?

D-Mac: “Every day I actually drive a Mazda RX7 which is terrible because it does about 4 miles to the gallon. I’m sick of it. It’s nearly sold and I think I’m going to buy something else. Once the fuel price hit €1.50, that was it for me.
Favourite drift car is definitely the ae64.”


Voluptuous_Girls asked:
How long does it take you to drift off to sleep at night? (hurr hurr hurr…)

D-Mac: *laughs* My answer to that is that I haven’t had any sleep recently so I can’t really give a good answer.

D-Mac then went on to ask me about the Official PlayStation Community and gave the following insight into his experience working on a project for the PSP in 2006:

“I did a video for Sony in ’06 called Sideways. It was for the PSP downloads. I was very much a very young driver back then. I did the video for them for the PSP which was pretty new back then, it was a download video off their official site which was pretty fun.”
Following the interview session it was back out to learn another advanced drift technique. Unfortunately this didn’t go as well as the first couple had done… for me anyway…

As I was turning the car in a spin, it caught one of the cones that marked where to turn. The cone got caught between the front wheel and the bumper which sent me into an uncontrollable spin – leading towards the grass. The front bumper caught on to the ground and subsequently got squished as I drove over it, before coming to a stop. Luckily it wasn’t anything bad and everyone had a good laugh about it before going back out on to the track for more drifting.

Drifting with EA - A Community Report

The finale of the day was another demonstration of D-Mac drifting in his new ae86, before we all left for home.

It has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life and I hope that you have all enjoyed reading this blog about my experience! Big thanks to our very own MusterBuster and EA’s Dan Sheridan for giving me this opportunity to attend and thanks to you all for reading today.

Wanna find out more about SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED? You’d better go here. You can also follow @EA_ActionMan on twitter, or check out our Need for Speed forum in the Official PlayStation Community.

Massive thanks to loonytoon1982 for going along and taking some pics, as well as speedhunters.com/Paddy McGrath for sorting us out with even more picture goodness.

Much Love,

MB

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