Forza Motorsport 7, The Male Ego And My Descent Into Madness

For the past week or so, YouTube has been doing this weird thing where it keeps recommending videos of racing games. Probably because I clicked some E3 footage of Forza Horizon 4, which looks stupidly awesome. Then I saw some 4K footage of the PC version of Forza Motorsport 7. Fuck my life. Seeing as the standard edition of that game is currently selling for around $30 if you know where to shop, I figured, hey, why the hell not.

Damn. This game is the most stupidly beautiful title I've ever run on my PC. There's this argument going on about how visuals in games have stopped improving for a while now, because resolution can only go so high and at some point textures are simply "photorealistic" and you can't get much better from there, but I disagree. If you compare everyone's favourite car porno from 2015, Project Cars 2, to Forza Motorsport 7 just in terms of visuals, Forza looks quite a bit better. It's definitely not the fairest comparison and both games have different physics, handling and a different target audience, but I still remember how everyone on my Facebook, myself included, drooled over footage from Project Cars (2) and Forza looks even more incredible. Of course games don't automatically look better every year or two. Heck, The Crew 2 actually has been downgraded visually when compared to its predecessor, which is absolutely nuts.

Also, fuck the soulless piece of junk that is The Crew 2.

Being the old fart that I am, I also believe that our perception of what counts as 'photorealistic' changes as graphics keep on improving. For example, and I'm not making this up, back when Microprose released Grand Prix 2 on PCs, I'd see my dad, his friends, my friends, everyone just gathering in front of the PC with their eyes and mouths open, because we absolutely couldn't believe how the game looked almost exactly like watching a race on tv!

You know, this.

That was back in 1995, where pixels on objects would just grow to the size of an entire house if you came too close to an object. But back then, seeing this game in action was so unbelievable and so utterly breathtaking, we almost couldn't believe what we were seeing at the time. That shit was almost photorealistic! The game was so close to the real thing, I still know the Monaco GP by heart, because I've played it TO DEATH on GP2. We kept playing this game for years, constantly modding and updating the cars and the roster of drivers to reflect the new seasons. Yep, we actually passed around floppy disks containing fan-made seasonal content updates.
Okay, back then, photos, our tv signal, tvs themselves, our eyes, everything was much lower quality than it is today. But at the time, GP2 was the single-most realistic-looking racing game we had ever seen and it stayed that way for quite some time.

Yes, THIS up there!

So for a start, I got Forza 7 because it has amazing visuals and I got it at a reasonably affordable price. And then I started driving, not wanting to go below medium difficulty settings. Basically, I disabled all steering and braking assists, kept the race lines, because I don't know any of the tracks, disabled the rewind-feature, because if feels like cheating to me, and left the AI on its default setting. And raced. Doing my best not to drive like a complete asshole, attempting to stay on the track, not winning by ramming the competition out of the way and being an overall dirty prick. With mixed results, but my first attempts went okay. I was so proud when I won my first post-tutorial race, I actually recorded the replay.

I'm only winning, because the AI drivers suck even harder than I do in that race. But I was happy, because I was still learning, I was successful enough and, while Forza isn't exactly a die-hard simulation, it's a bit more challenging than, say, Need for Speed. And it all ended when the game pointed out I was really just winning because of my AI settings. Long story short, Forza recommended changing AI skill to "above average". And that's when everything went to shit.

Up to this point, I did the best I could to actually race around the track in the exact way you're supposed to race, not taking any shortcuts through the grass or other weird shit, which would get you penalized or disqualified in any serious race. Because even on the higher difficulty settings, the AI is super fair and shows remarkable sportsmanship. They stay on track, they avoid contact, just good, clean racing displayed by all the bots around you. And I tried so hard to play along! Usually with one of two possible results: 1) I fail to take a turn properly, fly off track, crash into a stack of tires and end up so far behind the pack, I may as well just start over. Yes, if I win, it's either without rewinds or no win at all. Or 2) I try my best not to hit anybody, not to end up in a bed of gravel or a stack of tires and just stay stuck in the middle of the pack or worse, resulting in a very dull, frustrating racing experience. That's because I'm a noob, I'm not very good with the tracks or the driving physics right now, I have difficulty keeping up, I get fucked.

Prague is one of my absolute favourite tracks. On a tangential note, excessive bloom can really fuck up a screenshot.

Ultimately, constant failures and restarts will eventually lead to 3) Anger. So if I can squeeze past a car on the inside of a turn, go way too fast and then just lean on the guy on the outside, pushing him off the track and gaining a position in the process like an absolute asshole, it's only a matter of time until I will. Some guy is hitting the brakes before a hairpin turn right in front of me and I've got way too much speed? Who needs brakes when you can ram the guy in front of you off the track? So over the course of every cup I slowly devolve from a highly motivated driver, fully intent on displaying nothing but the finest sportsmanship to an angry troglodyte, who will push you right the fuck off the road for his own advantage.

Funnily enough, what annoys me the most is how the game lets me get away with this. So I end up winning one cup after another by being a ruthless, cheating cunt, while all the AI drivers around me are far more skilled and perfectly fair. So after every race I tell myself, alright, this time we're gonna be good, no more shortcuts, no ramming, no contact, let's pretend this is a serious race and win through superiour skill, not brute force.

Five minutes later...

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
Of course I could just set the AI back to 'average' and win without being a total jizzbag. Nobody will know, no one is gonna judge me, my dick won't fall off, even if it'll feel that way. There's no shame in lowering the difficulty. But I can't. I won't. I'll totally beat the above average drivers fair and square eventually, because I'm so totally good at racing!

The Top Gear sticker makes my car 20% faster. Everybody knows this.

In the end I just went completely insane. I tricked out a 1990 Renault Alpine (for nostalgia, my old man had one IRL) to a point where it could compete with any 1000hp hypercar.  Of course the car was never built for anything like this, it feels impossible to control and shoots all over the place, but it accelerates like a fucking space shuttle. Then I went and raced some "above average" hypercars with it. I basically ended up flying right past the entire field, rocketing all over the place. Again, I genuinely tried to stay on track, tried to avoid contact as much as I could and you can see in the video below, how I'm getting a little better with the race course in every lap until I eventually stop mowing the lawn all the time.

I love this game. I'd love it hell of a lot more if I wasn't too stubborn to lower the stupid difficulty already. But picking any one of the game's 700+ cars, tricking the absolute shit out of it and racing some of the world's most expensive and powerful supercars is as ludicrous and stupid as it is satisfying and fun. The game is called Forza Motorsport 7, so I reckon that at this time, everyone who ever cared about this series is probably a bit tired of it now, while I'm only just starting to discover it. But hey, that's me. Maybe I'll start playing Overwatch by 2020!