If you haven't heard, the playable demo for Forza Motorsport 3 was released on XBOX Live this morning. I just loaded it for the first time and ran 4 laps on the one included track (made top 5% on the leaderboards kthx), and I can sum up my impressions with a single cynical question:
"How am I playing Gran Turismo 5 when my PS3 isn't on?"
Honestly, I've never in my life seen such a big-budget, exceptionally executed, shameless copy of anything in the digital world, much less a game. It feels like an April Fool's joke. They copied the exact trademark camera movements and angles around a vehicle when you're choosing a color, and even the "accept" and "cancel" menu
sounds are
distinctly GT-esque, as are the background music tracks. Once you're on the track, the lighting model, default control responsiveness, and overall driving dynamics are again Gran Turismo fare. There is absolutely zero "Forza flavor" in this game. No finite quantity of words can comprehensively describe the depth and breadth of my puzzlement and astonishment, and I'm not what you would call an easily excitable guy.
All of that said, though, I did just sell my copy of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue on eBay, and the chances that I will purchase the full version when it comes out next year are now very, very slim. This is coming from a total Gran Turismo nut who lived & breathed GT4 before stepping up to a PS3 (which didn't play it very nicely). I've been playing Forza 2 for awhile now, mostly because it was the best thing out there to tide me over until the release of GT5. I've run & won all of the races, unlocked & bought all of the cars (legitimately), and tuned up some pretty decent multiplayer cars. I like Forza 2's upgrade & tuning interfaces, and the custom paint & vehicle graphics features are downright awesome. However, I've always found the
driving experience in Forza 2 to be unrealistic, and tuning responses are sometimes quite inaccurate. The concept of tire slip, for instance, seems to be either emulated or completely missing. A vehicle with 20psi in the tires is no sloppier around a corner than with 100psi, the tires just warm up faster. Translation of steering input is almost instantaneous, regardless of setup. It's fun, but just not right.
Forza 3 has gotten it right. The car I chose for my initial jaunt was the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, and I can say with a great deal of confidence, that this thing drove like a real Evo X. Mind you, I'm not talking out the wrong orifice here. I
owned an Evo VIII, and even
raced it successfully. A VIII is not the same as an X, true, but I've watched enough videos of the X and read enough detailed reviews from professional drivers who were intimately familiar with the previous models to have a decent enough understanding of how it drives. Forza 3, I'll repeat, got it right. The beautiful response to trail braking. The weight transfer. The understeer. The overdrive oversteer. It's all there.
Folks holding the reins at Turn 10, you should be ashamed of yourselves for what you've done, but what you've done is phenomenal. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are going to become better drivers thanks to Forza 3. You've successfully brought the one & only true "driving simulator," Gran Turismo, to the XBOX platform where users can benefit from a thriving community and numerous online features that Sony's PSN & Polyphony divisions simply aren't going to match.
