There’s an update coming for Trackmania United within a couple of weeks, so I fired it up tonight in preparation. I’d play it more often, but it’s annoying to have to dig out the disc for it just on the occasional whim. If it ever becomes cheap enough on Steam, I’ll be tempted to rebuy it there just so it won’t need the disc.

I discovered I still had some solo campaign tracks that I hadn’t finished yet, so I polished off the rest of the difficulties in the Snow environment campaign. One of the tracks was really annoying since it had two parts where you had to do barrel rolls inside a wire mesh, which is really hard with the truck in that environment. I also finished off the Normal difficulty levels in the Rally environment, but still have the Hard and Extreme ones to go in that one and also in the Island environment. All of the other environments are finished, though I can always try for better times, of course.

I ran into one common problem I’d been having before, though. In order to set an ‘official’ time for rankings on the world leaderboard, you have to spend some in-game currency. Of course, as soon as I spend them and start an ‘official’ run, I start making stupid little mistakes that I didn’t in the offline practice runs, and end up with a worse official time…

I poked my head into the Multiplayer section, but there were hardly any servers up and running in North America, unfortunately. The Trackmania games have always been far more popular in Europe, and France (the developer’s native country) had over 110 servers up. Hopefully the release of the update will bring back some more players.