Silver Fox's Space

Forza Motorsport 3 is simply a very fun and entertaining  video game to play.  More than 400 vehicles are available, including production cars, tuners, high-performance race cars, and, for the first time in the series, trucks, from 50 different manufacturers, and each vehicle feels unique. 

Guiding a Ford Focus or a Toyota Celica around a course isn’t terribly challenging, but as the game progresses, faster and better vehicles are unlocked, and taming some of the game’s more powerful offerings can be a daunting task.  100 different track variations are also included, giving players plenty of asphalt to familiarize themselves with. 

Whereas Forza 2 put a heavy focus on drift racing, this new iteration treats it as one of several race styles that can be utilized in normal races.  There are many turns and sequences where drifting may be the best path to take but it’s never the only option. 

This is especially true since Forza 3 has removed the time penalties associated with going off the track.  Instead, driving more than a few feet into grass or sand will slow players’ car to a crawl, creating a more natural penalty system.

Assists like Traction Control, Anti-Lock Brakes, and Stability Control will likely be the first to be turned on, but the real difference maker is the guideline, which tells players when to turn and brake.  Even the guideline is scalable, with settings for it to appear at all times, or just on turns where speed management is crucial.  Damage modeling has been improved, it now includes the ability to roll your car over, and the effect that damage has on your car is adjustable as well.

The most significant addition to Forza 3 is the rewind feature.  At any point in any single player race, players can press the Back button and rewind their ace a few seconds.  The rewind can be used as many times as players want, and there is no penalty for using it.   

Despite the fact that Forza 3 is a racing sim, many gamers will buy it solely for its customization engine.  Much like in the previous games, players can paint their vehicles and add vinyl decals to create unique designs, but this time, everything has been improved. 

Small tweaks, like the ability to edit paint and decal colors, new vinyl pieces, and a streamlined interface make designing much easier than before, and open up the door for designers with more aesthetic vision than artistic skill .

Like PGR 4, the open-ended career mode is helped by being structured in such a way that you don’t need to play for a long period of time to unlock things. It allows you to get a lot done in very little time by rewarding players frequently, and is the kind of career mode that I can see myself going back to for a long time to come since it is so vast. There are hundreds of racing series to complete over the length of the mode, including a variety of endurance races.

Once the outside of a ride is set up, players can use race money to purchase newer, faster, stronger, and more customizable parts for the inside.  Online, Forza 3 features two impressive facets; online races and the innovative Storefront. 

You can also choose to auto-upgrade vehicles instead of manually upgrading everything part-by-part. This certainly makes things much easier for those who don’t want to tinker with their cars, but it comes at a price.  You can easily find yourself paying a lot of money for these upgrade packages, and if you just need some minor tweaks to a car, you  will pay too much to make the changes you need to make just for the convenience of doing it all at once.

The Forza series has been top-notch visually since its inception and Forza 3 continues that tradition by offering up the most detailed car models.

Forza Motorsport 3 is the best racing sim ever released. The gameplay is solid and the graphics are amazing.

There is enough to keep the player busy for months. The online community, like in past Forza games, is always active and there will always be someone to race online with.

The Season Play mode will keep the player busy for a very long time and after the first six seasons, it is possible to keep racing through new seasons.

Quote of the Day:
If you aren't living on the edge, then you are taking up too much space.
--Anonymous

Source: http://www.operationsports.com/videoview.php?id=404

"My ultimate goal is to connect people, turn gamers into car lovers but car lovers into gamers," says Dan Greenawalt, the lead producer of Forza Motorsport 3.

From E3 2009, I witnessed particular games to become excited about. One of these video games is Forza Motorsport 3, scheduled to be released worldwide on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in October 2009.

Although the cliché “definitive” was overused at the Microsoft Xbox 360 presentation, I thoroughly enjoyed and was impressed by what I saw and heard about Forza 3 at E3 on G4TV and on the Web simply because the game is fun.

In case you slept though the E3 2009 media coverage, Forza Motorsport 3 is an upcoming racing simulator video game currently in development by Turn 10 Studio.  It is the sequel to Forza Motorsport 3 and the third installment in the Forza Motorsport series.

New additions to the game include an in-car driving view, one button assisted driving, and vehicle rollover. Also included will be the ability to create in game videos and upload them to the Forza Motorsport website.

Forza Motorsport 3 emphasizes cars and therefore, is for car lovers.  The vehicle list includes over 400 cars/trucks (you can race SUVs) from 50 different manufacturers. This includes Audi, Honda, Nissan, Ferrari, BMW, and several others.

How many? Let’s try a recount because these are big numbers.

Forza 3 packs in more than 400 "fully customizable and tunable" cars from 50 manufacturers and 100-plus real world tracks. New locations include the Montserrat region in Spain, the rugged Amalfi Coast in Italy, and the American Southwest.

Forza Motorsport 3 now sports an in-cockpit view.

User-generated content was a big feature of Forza 2 and it's going to have a larger role in the sequel. Of course, it wouldn't be Forza without an extensive customization tool. 

You get added ability to capture video, which can be posted on the Internet for other gamers to see, you can set up a home video arena with up to four screens: three for the track view and one for the rearview mirror, and you can control up to 9,000 variables in setting up your car, everything from gear ratios to tire sidewall flex.

The game's paint editor will return. It allows you to decorate your cars using your own designs and put them up for auction online.

There's also a video editor that grants you the opportunity to create these elaborate and choreographed clips. It will be  easier to find awesome custom jobs for downloading.

If art's not your thing, however, you can crawl underneath the hood and tweak and fine tune your ride.

From reading articles on the Internet, I learn that the career mode is ridiculously large and thus, very improved. The new career mode features calendar-based seasons. These seasons are controlled by their own AI and are fully dynamic.

A new single-player season mode will put you through a completely personalized racing calendar that includes more than 200 different events, including Circuit, Oval, Drag, Drift, and Timed Events. No two calendars will be the same.

The game analyzes the types of cars you enjoy racing, the car classes you dig, your skill, and more to determine which races you'd like. It will take hundreds of hours to exhaust the dynamic scheduling. As for the season mode, it's timed to get you fully immersed with all cars, tracks, etc., after about 50 hours of driving time.

I expect Forza 3 to “push the envelope” (speaking of clichés) regarding the Xbox 360’s technology and capabilities, particularly the graphics engine.  Did you notice the beautiful, detailed backgrounds?

A new graphics engine allowed the designers to create models that have ten times the polygons of the ones in Forza 2. You can expect fully functioning cockpits with working dials and other assorted features.

Beautiful environments, like the mountain range and lakes that surround the Camino Viejo track, whiz by at a smooth 60 frames per second, and a variety of driving options ensure that practically anyone can have a good time behind the wheel.

Forza 3 will be an easier ride.  Turn all of the auto-assists on, and you can drive doing little more than hitting the accelerator and turning left and right. Auto braking makes a big difference. 

There is automatic suspension-setup tuning, an auto-brake can slow your car around the track so all you have to do is steer, and if all else fails, there is a five-second button that allows you to replay the five seconds before you crashed.

One of the biggest additions, is Rewind. You will be able to rewind the action after you make a mistake or simply decide to tackle the game a different way.  Rewind serves really well as a teaching tool.

I remember holding a lead throughout an entire race, when I hit a car I was overtaking near the end, spinning out, and having my car damaged, which loses credits, and even losing the race.  Rewind solves this.

Of course, these assists can be turned off and gamers earn more money if they race without the aid of assists.  However, the game doesn't penalize you for using them either, as players can still gain Achievements and experience everything Forza 3 has to offer even if they need some help.

Turn them off and you'll find that Forza 3 offers a challenging and realistic driving experience that, if you're not as skilled behind the wheel as you think you are, might give you a great opportunity to roll your car and check out the impressive damage modeling.

Each of Forza 3's vehicles takes realistic damage. Hit something hard enough and you'll scrape the paint, dent the body, shatter windows and even flip the car.

The online multiplayer mode gains an all-new game rules editor. New Xbox Live scoreboards will display not only the greatest racers but also the most prolific car tuners and painters in the community.

Forza Motorsport 3 will push the disc capacity beyond its limit, with the game to ship on two discs.  Disc one is the full experience (and even disc one is bigger than any other racing game out there) and disc two includes a lot of extra cars, even a handful of tracks (i.e., cars and tracks that can be downloaded onto the Xbox 360's hard drive).

Look a price of $59.95 or $79.95 for the collector’s edition.

Quote of the Day:
Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die...
--Alfred, Lord TENNYSON

YouTube - NCAA Football 10 Video Game Teaser E3 2009 ALL ACCESS Los A
  

Project Natal and the motion sensing controls will be my lasting impressions of E3 2009.  But exactly how soon will this new generation of game controls become commonplace?

It appears that the Wii will soon have the advanced motion sensing capabilities and that the PS3 motion sensing controls and Xbox 360’s Project Natal will be emerging in 2010.

We’ll see. I’m not the most accurate prognosticator of upcoming technologies.

No single console or platform dominated E3 2009.  For me, Microsoft had the best press conference, emphasizing game play. Both Nintendo and Sony talked too much and became too philosophical at times. 

Quote of the Day:
When you come to a fork in the road...take it.
--Yogi Berra