Forza Horizon: YOLO!!!

Forza Horizon is out.  And as you'd expect, the gaming media has already proclaimed it the greatest racing game ever made.  Well, there's a few defectors who gave it less than the fabled 9/10, but a lot of people did including our beloved Giant Bomb.  Seriously, with this and the Lazily Named NFS: Most Wanted, that's it--we racing aficionados are set for life.  Sega might as well pack it in now cause they will never topple Forza Horizon and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  Cause those are the greatest racing games ever made.  It's like the American Idol Effect...how Randy and the stupid judges always proclaim "yo dawg, you're the best singer we've ever had" to every singer and "talent-wise, this is the best season ever" every season despite the fact that ratings have been going down and the AI contestants have sold fewer albums each passing year.  That makes sense.

So what do I care what these people think.  When I think of gaming media, I think of honest intellectuals like Geoff Keighley who were not paid off or bribed in any way:

EDIT: Before I go on, check out my buddy RStyle's Forza Horizon demo opinions too.  They are much kinder than mine, lol.

So anyway, I downloaded the bigass 1.5 GB Forza Horizon demo. Let's give this a spin. After watching the wonderful cutscene full of women, energy drinks, and bad hiphop/dubstep, I enter the free-roam world of a faceless white guy driving a yellow Dodge Viper. Drive down the road to the first race and pick the Mitsubishi Lancer and go dirt racing. Wow, I've never played a racing game on dirt, groundbreaking stuff there, Forza. Then I came in first, won some credits, and drove the Viper in free-roam some more. Plowed into a PT Cruiser, both cars came to a dead stop, and eventually the Viper started nudging the PT Cruiser in reverse. It was then that I realized this game is a f***ing waste of my brain cells.

Ok, that was harsh, I admit, this is actually a good game that has some limited value.  But I'll be damned if this isn't another Need for Speed clone, minus the obligatory cop chases. You know the phrase "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it must be a duck?" Well, this is a Need for Speed game for that same reason. The car handling is old-fashioned unresponsive NFS-style as my car sort of just "floats" forward as I try to follow that stupid green line. I don't care if this is "realistic" or not--it drives me nuts that this is how every mainstream racing game handles these days.

I need a citation for this, but I believe it was Shigeru Miyamoto who said about the original Super Mario Bros., "When you press A, we wanted Mario to jump. Not 'sort-of jump'. Not 'starting to jump'. But JUMP instantly." Which probably explains why SMB is lauded as revolutionizing the platform genre. And when I press left or right on the joystick, I want the car to turn left or right, not drift in that direction with the incentive of a Lazy College Senior.

I don't think this game has manual transmission either. Maybe if I sifted through the Dirt Showdown style menus with the stupid cyan-magenta-orange burnt-in hues, then maybe I can find it but I didn't have the incentive to look. Really, right after the demo, I fired up Forza 4 and I thought the handling was more responsive in F4 (with normal cars, not fancy R1 cars). Hey, at least Forza 4 runs at friggin 60 fps while Forza Horizon settled for 30.  Yes, I know Sega All-Stars Racing runs at 30 fps too--I dealt with that enough in the past.  So I just cannot call Forza Horizon a Forza game, I'm sorry (then again, I'm not really crying over one less Forza game either...don't we have enough racing "sims" as it is).

I was thinking about the game in a nutshell. Here you are, a bunch of underground free riders breaking all sorts of laws at some "speed festival" with fridge buzz over the radio as you go free-roaming through the forest/desert dodging traffic in the same typical lineup of sports cars doing drifts for "epic points."  Why there are no cops ANYWHERE in the vicinity is beyond me.  And then it hit me--this game is a fad.  Might as well market it in Hot Topic since that's all it is.  Today's "flavor" of racing game is the Need for Speed model with meaningless stunts and bad music.  The whole game is derivative.  Seriously, what does Forza Horizon do that is revolutionary?  You race at night?  Wow, brilliant, I've never played a night racing game before.  Oh, but you can also race against the plane!  Surprise, this is a driving game, I couldn't give a crap about the plane.  By the way, both those things you could do in OutRun 2, a game that came out eight years ago.

Look at it this way.  Take Daytona USA (again).  I assume most everyone reading this blog likes this game.  Well, take note of when it came out.  1994 ('93 if you want to get picky but that was a limited Japanese release).  Daytona USA is 18 years old and we are still talking about it.  We like the handling, the music, the multiplayer.  We clamored about it enough to get emulators and official ports of it many years later!  Same thing with Crazy Taxi, OutRun 2, Sega Rally, Scud Race, Daytona 2--ports are coming and more people are getting the chance to find out about these "gems" (DAE PLAY DIS GAEM???) and they like them.  And it was because the content of these games are original.  Sure, arcade racers with drift mechanics were popular in the 90's, but I can tell you when Nagoshi-San and the AM2 sat down at the roundtable to discuss Daytona USA and others, it's apparent their first thought was "let's make a good racing game" as opposed to "let's make a marketable racing game."

Now how about Forza Horizon.  This game was released in 2012.  Let's assume that society is still intact in 2030, 18 years from now.  Do you think we're gonna give a damn about Forza Horizon then?  Or will it be another one of those derivative racing games that we got hyped up about but stopped caring a year later?  I'm willing to bet the latter.  And the same thing will happen to Need for Speed: Most Wanted too.  Hence the term "YOLO!!!"  Cause you're dead in a few years, Forza & Need for Speed.

That's why I'm hoping and praying for Sonic & Sega All-Stars: Transformed.  Cause at least it's not a total clone of its main influence (Mario Kart).  And it's why I'm sick and tired of racing games these days.  I'm done.