Forza Motorsport 3

"The demo for this just got released today, and considering it's such an anticipated title I woke up early to play it.

Overall it looks and feels great. It's a HUGE upgrade from Forza 3, and there's a new level of spit and polish that has been applied in the presentation that really makes F2 look last-gen.

The driving itself is a lot of fun, you feel in control of your car and really feel the sense of speed. Fast cars feel fast, and slow cars are also fast. That was one of my pet peeves in other racing games, I enjoy using the slower cars... which still reach 140-160Kph, but it felt like you're going 60KPH. As anybody can tell you driving 160KPH in real life is still an exhilarating experience, so that accurate sense of speed was never translated through. However, in the demo you can drive the Mini Cooper S which reaches those speeds and it felt great.

Of course if the Mini Cooper feels nice and fast, it's obvious that the true race cars feel that much faster, and wow did the R3 Porsche feel insane. It was actually too fast and too hard for me to control... which is fine because that's what race cars are actually like.

The other great surprise is just how well the cockpit view works. I've played with cockpit view in other games such as PGR and Dirt, and they're just too confined and distracting to be usable. With F3 they've nailed a nice balance between form and function, so while you may not get to see all the beautifully rendered details, you can actually see the road. The one thing though is that the rear view mirror usually gets lost in the process, so you have to rely on pressing the "look-behind" button instead of just checking your mirrors. Would have been very cool to just use the mirrors like in real life. If GT5 has head tracking while racing I could see that becoming a sweet feature.

I'll definitely be playing the demo more when I can get the chance, and am keeping my pre-order... but won't upgrade it to the LE.

And finally here's my iPhone recorded replay...

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"Now that I've had the game for a couple of days I can give some updated impressions.

Overall: This is the best realistic racing game of all time. Period. Hands down. If you're into racers at all, you'll love this game.

GT5 has A LOT to live up to.

I could sit here writing a lot of really nice things, and try really hard to come up with hyperbole to express how great the game is, but instead I'll just post a couple of screenshots I created in the game.



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