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Recordkeeping: Forza Horizon 4 ONGOING
Oct. 1st, 2018 02:56 amOne thing I say a lot, so often people who know me may actually be sick of hearing it, is that video games right now are better than they've ever been and are only getting better as time passes. There are more games, from more different and diverse creators centered around more themes at more price ranges than any time in history and that's glorious. I started playing video games as a small child and I will never have to stop until the day I die.
Forza Horizon 4 is unlike any car-centered game I've ever seen in that long history of gaming because it does not care whether you win or lose.
Forza is a sandbox playground (from Playground Games) where you are an invincible infinitely rich shapeshifting human at a year-round Scottish festival for loud music with cars that never need gas, oil-changes or maintenance, populated by gleeful DJ drones who live to cheer you on like self-esteem-building robots as you roam around the countryside breaking two-hundred-year-old stone fences and patio furniture. They're just happy to be here. They're just happy YOU'RE here. Presumably you too are happy to be here or you'd have turned the game off by now.
And god there's so much to do. Races (of various kinds). Go-fasts. Go-curvies. Drifts. Jumps. Scenery. Virtual house collecting. Virtual car collecting. Car photography. Repaint your cars, retune your cars, slop your billion-dollar supercar into a reservoir and decided eh screw it I want to drive a truck now. Make a Peel P50 (which is a three-wheeled box that does not deserve this treatment) go 170 MPH on the drag strip and make online players gently shit themselves when they see the replay. You can do whatever you like at Forza and they will keep handing you experience points for it. The game does not care if you are first place or last place, you showed up, congratulations.
Visually it's straight-up the most beautiful game I've ever seen, prettier than our actual reality. I do not care about cars but this game contains cars I can actually care about, whether it's because some enterprising dingus on the internet painted Top Cat or the N7 logo on it or because it's a "classic" from the past I finally get to see what the fuss is about.
My friend Collin drove a Ford Escort because he could not be trusted with a real car, and now I can drive the same car off a bridge. My father drove a Chevrolet Blazer because he wanted to cultivate an 'outdoorsy' image, now I can ram it through a mud puddle the size and shape of the Nile River. A character in the novel 'Chrome Circle' swears by his Mustang Mach 1, and it is indeed quite a nice car. I don't know what makes it good. I still can't tell a carborator from a suspension, but I know it goes whrrrrrrm and spins in place for a minute and then zips off like Sonic the Hedgehog.
(Speaking of which, being as I am a furry and my Xbox Live friends list is populated by people with names like X The Fox and Y The Rabbit and Lupa I and Dragonite etc, my copy of Forza has AI driver avatar names that make the game look like a Mario Kart/Sonic All-Star Crossover. 10/10 would populate the universe exclusively with furries again.)
A game lives or dies on whether it's fun, and Forza Horizon 4 is absurdly fun because it knows when to get out of the way and just let me dick around, and when to provide a solid concrete goal to attain. Collectable breakable signs scattered around the map keep me moving from place to place, and they plan to shuffle the events every week-long 'season' of racing to keep the game lively. This game has MMO legs, it's in the 'game as a service' tradition, and if you went back in time and told a small soft marketable child version of me that there was a game you could come back to any time and find the developers had put together new stuff for you to do, young child me would have exploded and caused a time paradox.
What I'm seeing, thus, is that Forza Horizon 4 is not a game I can sit and play and play and play until I've beaten it. It's something to keep installed and keep poking at, like I would an MMO. Stop in now and then, relax, slam a Jeep into oncoming traffic.
It's a wonderful, very car-centric life. It's maybe the best giant driving sandbox I've ever seen. I can hardly believe there were three MORE of these games and I've never touched them. How do they still have so many great ideas, after three other games? That's absolutely incredible.
Games are great. Forza is great.
I'm glad to be alive and playing video games here in the future.
Forza Horizon 4 is unlike any car-centered game I've ever seen in that long history of gaming because it does not care whether you win or lose.
Forza is a sandbox playground (from Playground Games) where you are an invincible infinitely rich shapeshifting human at a year-round Scottish festival for loud music with cars that never need gas, oil-changes or maintenance, populated by gleeful DJ drones who live to cheer you on like self-esteem-building robots as you roam around the countryside breaking two-hundred-year-old stone fences and patio furniture. They're just happy to be here. They're just happy YOU'RE here. Presumably you too are happy to be here or you'd have turned the game off by now.
And god there's so much to do. Races (of various kinds). Go-fasts. Go-curvies. Drifts. Jumps. Scenery. Virtual house collecting. Virtual car collecting. Car photography. Repaint your cars, retune your cars, slop your billion-dollar supercar into a reservoir and decided eh screw it I want to drive a truck now. Make a Peel P50 (which is a three-wheeled box that does not deserve this treatment) go 170 MPH on the drag strip and make online players gently shit themselves when they see the replay. You can do whatever you like at Forza and they will keep handing you experience points for it. The game does not care if you are first place or last place, you showed up, congratulations.
Visually it's straight-up the most beautiful game I've ever seen, prettier than our actual reality. I do not care about cars but this game contains cars I can actually care about, whether it's because some enterprising dingus on the internet painted Top Cat or the N7 logo on it or because it's a "classic" from the past I finally get to see what the fuss is about.
My friend Collin drove a Ford Escort because he could not be trusted with a real car, and now I can drive the same car off a bridge. My father drove a Chevrolet Blazer because he wanted to cultivate an 'outdoorsy' image, now I can ram it through a mud puddle the size and shape of the Nile River. A character in the novel 'Chrome Circle' swears by his Mustang Mach 1, and it is indeed quite a nice car. I don't know what makes it good. I still can't tell a carborator from a suspension, but I know it goes whrrrrrrm and spins in place for a minute and then zips off like Sonic the Hedgehog.
(Speaking of which, being as I am a furry and my Xbox Live friends list is populated by people with names like X The Fox and Y The Rabbit and Lupa I and Dragonite etc, my copy of Forza has AI driver avatar names that make the game look like a Mario Kart/Sonic All-Star Crossover. 10/10 would populate the universe exclusively with furries again.)
A game lives or dies on whether it's fun, and Forza Horizon 4 is absurdly fun because it knows when to get out of the way and just let me dick around, and when to provide a solid concrete goal to attain. Collectable breakable signs scattered around the map keep me moving from place to place, and they plan to shuffle the events every week-long 'season' of racing to keep the game lively. This game has MMO legs, it's in the 'game as a service' tradition, and if you went back in time and told a small soft marketable child version of me that there was a game you could come back to any time and find the developers had put together new stuff for you to do, young child me would have exploded and caused a time paradox.
What I'm seeing, thus, is that Forza Horizon 4 is not a game I can sit and play and play and play until I've beaten it. It's something to keep installed and keep poking at, like I would an MMO. Stop in now and then, relax, slam a Jeep into oncoming traffic.
It's a wonderful, very car-centric life. It's maybe the best giant driving sandbox I've ever seen. I can hardly believe there were three MORE of these games and I've never touched them. How do they still have so many great ideas, after three other games? That's absolutely incredible.
Games are great. Forza is great.
I'm glad to be alive and playing video games here in the future.
