Forza Motorsport 3

Okay, so i just came home from school having been looking forward to this demo and when i go in to download it it says i have to have a gold account. Ik freaking pissed off and now i have to go to work :cry:
 
It's hardly a surprise that you need a gold account, it's like that most of the time.. :b
 
This is sooooo goooooood.

Whats even better is the fact that the demo barely represents the game ! Full game with all those tracks, cars, tuning, painting, drifting, building etc

BONER !!
 
Ok, I have now played the demo with all the five cars and good god this game is awesome! The graphics are unbelievable and the surroundings look better than in any other game I have played so far. You can really tell that there has been a lot of effort put in the making of this game. October really can't come quick enough.

Off to kick some ass in the Mini :D
 
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hmmm, I'm not all that impressed. Other than the cars, I thought the graphics looked quite cartoony (especially the scenery).....might just be that track though. Physics are good, however.
 
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Any word on when non-gold people will be able to get the demo?
 
I applied a 48-hour code I had, and it still hasn't gone through! What gives?

You can't use trial codes for this kind of thing. It has to be "proper" Gold membership :)
 
I wasn't too hyped for Forza 3 but I was still mildly disappointed.

The force feedback is weak and limpwristed, with notchy, 1-and-0 response feeling. Very digital, very sterile, very boring. I found myself relying more on the rumble feature to figure out when I was losing traction or needed to countersteer. The steering is also delayed by a quarter second or so.

The loading screen says "Forza 3 is the most realistic racer ever" but the Mini felt and went like a supercar. The cars seem horribly unbalanced, I was able to pass a GT3 RS and an F430 in my R8 with ease, on the straight, even without a run, and outbraked them every time, even on hard. In the Evo X, the hardest car to pass was the Cayenne.

I never heard so much as a peep of tire noise from the AI on hard, so no threshold braking, and going slowly through the corners. On hard, they simply offered no challenge after a lap or two with each car, knowing what the cars could do.

The cockpit view is usable, but compared to what's been done before I would have expected more. The race cars are louder from the replay camera than in the cockpit. What? That said the sounds are better than in Forza 2. You can clearly hear that it's higher fidelity, though there are many re-cycled sounds and much of it sounds the same as before.

The graphics are really good, tons of visual interest and I kept running off the track because I was mesmerized by some scene far in the distance. This is easily Forza's strongest point.

Forza will take my time away from me, for sure, but as far as a simulation goes I'd rather play Shift, actually. The physics are good, better than Shift's easily, but the force feedback lets it down. The oversteer comes in gradually and you have a better sense of when the car is going to lose it. Trail braking acts well, but still not quite realistic (the cars don't seem to respond to changes in contact patch as gradually or smoothly as they should). The cars have more understeer now, and seem more prone to breaking loose under power, though that could just be the cars in the demo (being, the California and the GT3 RSR). The Evo X seems overpowered with it's AWD, but with no other similar car to compare it to, I'm going to assume it's fine. All the cars have too much grip and are too razor-like in response, especially the lower class cars. With all the talk of tire deformation, I didn't feel it. It still felt like the tires are way too responsive. The suspension model has improved, though. The cars seem more affected by weight transfer. I'm happy to see that the paddle-shift is modeled when appropriate.
 
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Download fasterrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
 
PROTIP: if you want to hotlap with any of the cars, select the car, highlight the race and press Y. At this point, you'll see the leaderboard. The top entry, above 1st place, will say "press A to start race". Highlight it and press A, and you will be able to do unlimited laps with no AI.


You can also activate drift mode by pressing left on the D-pad.
 
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Just got off a 40 minute testing session, so here's my verdict. If you haven't played it and would like to find out for yourself, close your eyes and scroll down to the next post.

Overall the game has become much more like GT. The main menu is more slick and race menus are based around panning track shots, much better than a slab or grey in the middle I think. There is now music in the races now, like Gran Turismo and which I will turn off straight away, just like I did in GT. I actually liked the fact that I didn't need to go there in FM2. Seems to be pretty generic, not heard anything I recognise yet.

To my joy and surprise, the penalties have gone! But they've been replaced by that nagging 'rewind' box which appears every time you put a wheel out of line, nagging you into giving up and trying again. I tried it but you don't really get to choose how far back you go. The game selects a completely random point in time to take you back to. It also stopped working on one race.

Other than that I only have one major issue with the game. In my races the AI kept smashing into each other (or was that me?) and light lenses got broken. I was pleased to see that for the first time, lights still work after the lenses are broken. But that lasted for 3 seconds when I realised that the Challenger I was following now had brighter red brake lights. Now if a car has red lenses then it will have white bulbs, not red! All of them are the same, and LED lights are just a block of light in game.

There are more minor niggles. When you hit start you get a clip of your car pulling up to the grid. Very nice, but it's the same every time. Then you get flashes of each angle as it counts down to the start, and you can't skip it! So you only have a split-second to get the revs right. The AI do seem a bit too polished on all modes, some mistakes would be nice. Last gripe is with the in car view and damage. Outside you can see your car getting beaten up, including cracked and missing windows. But flick to in-car and they're fine, no cracks, no reflections. Nothing!

Other than that I enjoyed the game. Sound is good as it bloody well should be these days, and graphics look good. On my 19" TV things tend to look a bit pixelated around the edges, so I tried my parents' HDTV. Unfortunately it's also a 19" @ 720p, but everything was much smoother. Personally I felt force feedback was fine. :dunno:

Oh, and I managed to put an R8 on its roof. :D

Anyway I'm sold on it, will get my pre-order in soon. :)
 
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On my 19" TV things tend to look a bit pixelated around the edges, so I tried my parents' HDTV. Unfortunately it's also a 19" @ 720p, but everything was much smoother. Personally I felt force feedback was fine. :dunno:

On my 30" 1080i tv it looked pixelated as well, my one major annoyance with FM2.:rolleyes:
 
So it's not just me then. Well that's something.
 
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