Cars Going FastTV Game

forza motorsport 7

I got an XBox One recently because I very specifically needed a machine to play my old XBox games. My 360 controllers are old as fuck and the sticks have drift on them that the JoyCon could only dream of, and since finding a new unfucked 360 pad is impossible, I got a whole new system instead.

Now the thing is, I bought this so I can play my neglected collection of old games. While I have been doing that, I have also been distracted by a couple of games I’ve missed out on in the past hardware generation. I’m talking about Forza Motorsport 7, naturally. This is actually my first time playing any game in the Forza series, actually. My love of Auto Racing came after I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t really play anything on my 360 anymore. Sure, I could’ve gotten Game Pass or simply bought the game off of Steam, but FM7 is a 70 GB game. That has to compete with my PC’s internal storage, which ain’t really all that big. It has to compete with all my art projects, all the fighting games, a large collection of music and pornography, among many other things. A game console does not have these problems, so it’s easier to simply download it to that and play on a big ass TV. Which I did.

Before I played this, I tried a little bit of Forza Horizon 4. Seemed like it would be cool: a semi-realistic driving game with a big open world, Burnout Paradise style. Instead I got a bunch of loot box bull shit, a storyline full of characters who look like their names are on the Epstein flight logs, and winning races didn’t unlock cars, but instead unlocked ads for cars that I could buy via microtransactions. Also, the game doesn’t run at 60 FPS. I’m not some asshole stickler for FPS or FOV or PIV or some shit, but if you make a racing game, it should run as fast as possible. The only exception to this rule is Ridge Racer 4, and that’s only because that game was good enough to make up for that weakness in other ways. A racing game on 8th gen hardware should not be having this problem. Anyways. Forza Horizon 4 sucked, and I wasn’t especially looking forward to trying out FM7, but I felt like I still should.

Good news: Forza Motorsport 7 is awesome. It is a game that gives me what I want: being able to drive really fast in cars that you can only afford if you game the stock market or commit a war crime (though I repeat myself) on courses that I’ve seen on TV. That’s it. Get a starter car, win some races, take the points you’ve earned from competing to buy more cars, and race those cars too. No bull shit about being a high-society dickhead or trying to become a movie star or whatever the fuck Horizon was about. No fucking lootboxes, either. Yeah, FM7 has some DLC, but it’s significantly less predatory than its competing spin-off. The whole reason I’ve been focusing on covering retro games is entirely because of shit like this; I remember a time when I would buy a video game, and I would be able to play the entire fucking video game. Not get an ad to let me know that I can purchase additional content on top of my already spent $60 that should have been in the game to begin with, that doesn’t even run at a good frame rate. Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the developers who are wrong.

yeah fuck this and fuck you forza horizon

But enough about bad racing games. I have spent the last two days with FM7, and I have not had this much fun with a racing game since the days of Gran Turismo 6 on my PS3. I drove an Indy Car at Daytona. I drove a Ferrari 340 at Monza. I drove a Nissan Fairlady in this gorgeously rendered Dubai, where bits of sand get caught up in the wind, creating this drifting wave across the road. On courses with rain, the raindrops gather on your windshield, and then your wipers kick on every few seconds to help you maintain visibility. That is, assuming that you’re using the cockpit view, which you should. For as much as I loved GT6, I couldn’t use the cockpit view in a number of cars, because they were so detailed that the frame rate would drop. FM7 does not have this problem, so I’m always looking through the windshield.

I do have a couple of complaints about Forza here. One, there’s a stark lack of Toyota representation. Two, and this is more of an XBox problem: I can’t just plug in a USB drive and import my own music to listen to while I drive like I could with GT6. I get that that isn’t super realistic, but who cares; it’s not like I need to hear the engines roaring as some sort of tactical thing. Other than that, I have no real issues. It’s exactly what I want, a racing game.

There’s a real beauty to FM7’s simplicity. All you do is drive, buy some cars, then drive some more. Racing games have worked that way since the 80s, because it works. The formula was perfected right out of the gate, and everything since then has been reinventing the wheel (so to speak). I’m glad I played this after I played Forza Horizon, if only to see just how much one company can fuck up the concept, and then see how a different company gets it right. In any event, I get the hype for Forza now; I’ll put it on par with GT. They’re both great.





Adventures On The Lonely Frontier

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