Forza Motorsport
Well I had to watch my younger brother this past weekend so I decided to go pick up a new game for us to play while he was over. After a quick look over what had recently been released and a phone call from a buddy telling me about it I quickly decided to pick up a copy of Forza Motorsports. This is one of the Gran Turismo series biggest competitors in my opinion. The vehicle physics are excellent, the graphics - astounding, and the car sounds seem less generalized than those in GT4. Along with the great gameplay there are several other things that I think set this game apart from GT4. While viewing replays you can get all sorts of data from the game about your drive. Default information is HP, Torque, Speed, Boost, Gear and RPM however you mountains more information such as the amount of stress on the tires, suspension travel, tire temperature, and so on. The Drivatar system is a great alternative to the GT4 b-spec driver which can be quite stupid on many occasions. In order to use a Drivatar you must first train it with your driving style. The better you can drive the better the Drivatar will do. There is also an engine swap option for some of the cars, such as my 1973 Porsche 911 with a modern 911 GT2 motor in it making near 800hp. The only down side is that there are very noticable bugs that occur. When the game is loading the next track it shows whatever the car you were in for the last race not the current race. For example, say you were driving a Corvette last race and now you are going to go tune your Audi for the AWD series when going to the Test track it would say loading Corvette C6 instead of the Audi which it was actually loading. Another big hole is the pretty much infinite money that can be made buying and selling engines for cars that can do motor swaps. Buy a VW Jetta, max out its engine than buy a custom engine. The new engine is discounted to 2,500CR when you buy it but if you sell it you recieve nearly 25,000CR for it. Clearly something was overlooked as this makes earning money from racing pointless. Regardless of these minor bugs what is really important is whether or not the game is fun to play and interesting enough to hold your attention which I must say Forza has been doing both of these, so far, as well as any GT series game.