The LevelJunkie's Lair

I spent some more time in Forza 3 tonight, but mostly in multiplayer this time, as we had a good little group going. I still need to unlock and buy a lot more cars since I’m currently limited to only a couple each of C class and below, but it was still pretty fun, and everyone was pretty close in skill so the outcomes varied a lot.

Today was the release of Forza 3, and I picked up my Collector’s Edition of it right after work and spent a few hours in it tonight. It’s a lot like Forza 2, but the big, earth-shattering change is the rewind ability, as seen in a few other games like GRID. A single little mistake on the last lap won’t ruin your race anymore, as you can just rewind to before it happened. The downside to it is that laps set when you use rewind won’t rank as highly as ‘clean’ laps on the leaderboards.

There are also more cars and tracks, and I’ve been pretty happy with the new tracks I’ve seen so far. I’ve done a handful of F-to-D class races and championships and I’ve stuck with the reward cars for now. I’ve got the AI set to easy, but all of the assists turned off, to try and get used to driving that way first.

And speaking of the AI, it’s capable of making its own mistakes. And even pretty big ones…

Edit: Oh, and since I got the Collector’s Edition of it (I’m a big sucker for special editions), it came with a handful of bonuses, including some exclusive cars I haven’t gotten around to buying yet, a VIP flag on my account (can’t remember offhand what the benefits of that are), and a Forza-branded keychain and 2GB USB stick. The keychain is metal and much sturdier than the cheap plastic thing you’d normally expect to get in a package like this, and the USB stick is a bit small compared to what you can get nowadays, but I can move my Ubuntu live disc over to it and free up some space on my regular thumb drive.

I wound up spending a bit more time in Midnight Club: LA than expected while waiting for the PS3 system update, and got a handful more races done. It turns out that the AI isn’t infallible after all; a few times, one of them would get spun around and fall way behind, and in one freeway race the opponent hit traffic and got so far behind that she didn’t even show up on the minimap anymore.

I was initially afraid that there wouldn’t be much choice in races, since very few of the green and yellow racers that I could plausibly beat were on the map, but just randomly driving around the map has caused a lot more of them to pop up, so there’s plenty of choice now. Even at these lower difficulties though, I often have to restart the race once or twice thanks to an unlucky hit on a wall or car in the opposite direction, or realizing I made a really bad turn choice.

I’ve also unlocked some performance upgrade options, so now I have to decide whether I want to start upgrading the Golf GTI I started out with, or save up for one of the better cars.

I also gave Midnight Club: LA a spin tonight, just to kill some time. There isn’t much story to it, just race, race, race. It’s an open-world racer in that you roam around the city and find people to race against, often leaving the exact path to take up to you as long as you hit the checkpoints.

It’s said to be fairly difficult, but I haven’t found it too bad so far. The racers available are divided into difficulties, and there’s always some lower-end green/yellow racers to go up against; you just don’t earn as much cash or reputation for them. And even if you lose, you often still earn a little bit of reputation, so races are never a complete waste.

The control itself is very arcadey, not realistic, but it’s still fairly precise, and obstacles and weaving through traffic haven’t really been a problem (people just leap out of the way). It’s very much seat-of-your-pants though, and my losses so far have often involved snap judgments on which path to take that turned out very badly. I think I’ve won about half of the races so far, out of around 8 so far.