tubbybelly

User Score
7.8

Presentation - 5.0
Gameplay - 8.0
Value - 5.0

With all the hype surrounding us these days in the mainstream media. Its easy to get caught up in all the hoopla. And if you are a fan of the racing genre, or a big fan of the Forza franchise. I bet you were easy picking for the over rated, and bloated ratings for the Forza Motorsports 3 hype wagon.

Did anyone in the world rate FM3 under 8.7 ? After 3 weeks and 10 hours at a minimum of gameplay a day, I certainly would. Forza Motorsports 3 would be lucky to get a 8.0 from me.

The next time you see Forza Motorsports 3 (9.5) or (9.2), or 5 outta 5. Why not have a listen to what real gamers like , you and I, think of this so called out of this world, cutting edge, best racer of all time. You do have the right to know another opinion, well don't you ? After all a consumer deserves the right to make an educated deceision with hard earned money.

At present the Forza Community, this is a large community of the Forza faithful that gather on the Forza forums are up in arms, protest, gathering petitions, ranting, complaining, etc. Does this sound like a title that boast a 9. anything ?

Time to Play

The first thing I noticed was the cars handle much better in FM3 than in FM2 in stock form. This was a nice change, however FM3 boast a large community of painters, tuners, etc. With tuning shops in mind the increase in vehicle handling has left the tuning community up in arms with very little to work with to combat things like:

- Quick Upgrade
- Auto Brake
- Rewind

Yes those features are in the game, this so called revolutionary, cutting edge racing sim has such features as quick upgrade, auto brake (while using this a 3 year old can race around the track with little difficulty), and of course rewind. If you crash in the middle of a race ( like Grid ) no worries, just push the rewind button and pretend it never happened.

For me the first thing I did was look at the features, hated them and turned them all off.

Ok so in single player we have Season Play which is a long and drawn out bore. Once again the crippled AI is back in FM3 from FM2. Turn off all assist, or turn on all assist with auto brake, race line, get rewind ready, and then select the Hard difficulty.

Jump in a race, and leave the AI behind. It is true however that the pig like AI will try and crash you or bully you a bit so you cant pass, but when all is said and down, season play is much like racing alone, you know the feeling, your the only car on the track and your something like half a mile ahead of the AI cars.  On the flip side on hard difficulty due to some of the short laps some may find it difficult to win a race with the AI's bullish behavior, while your car starts at the back.

Its simply a boring Season style setup. The classes are open which means if you start the game with few credits and race in a d class meeting. There is nothing to stop you from coming back with an R1 class car and trashing the competition even worse.

But dont get to bragging about your laptime. In FM3 there is no local leaderboard. Yip, its true ! Gee Whiz, remember years ago with Pac Man and Space Invaders, even Donkey Kong you could see the top high scores. Then as consoles progressed we were able to see many more stats and records on a leaderboard. Wow, there is no leaderboard, so in other words if you do not have Xbox Live, you will never know what any car raced on a track ? HA !! Rubbish !

O and for this years so called top racing game title of all times. There is no system link ? HA, can you believe that. The days of FM2 are surely gone. Imagine having your friends over for a weekend party. Hey Bobby , dont forget your 360 and FM3 game. Ok, no worries I won't.  So you get everything setup to have some awesome racing on this years most awesome racers and BOOM ! Your hopes are broken !! No System Link!!

NO SYSTEM LINK !

You can however both have two xbox live gold accounts, which you must have for anything to function on this title. Run it all through a router and get your game on that way for what, isnt it something like 10.95 a month for a gold subscrip? No idea. $$

So, you dont really care about system link, And hey I understand I only have one Xbox 360. So you say ok, im Tim the Tuner, I know where its at. Im going to tune up a few cars and get in on some serious online multiplayer action. WRONG !!

Public Lobbies of FM2 are out !! Matchmaking is in:

You may not race with your friends
You may not select the track you want to race
You may not race where you want when you want, its match making.
And be careful in these rooms, if your a good racer, you could get booted but the new voting system. O Please, this so called sim racer is sad on a rainy day.

O, so sorry got ahead of myself thinking about the gutted, horrific, terrible, lifeless, matchmaking system that over 90 percent of Forza veterans absolutely hate in public poll.

Polls, wow you know another one comes to mind. This year FM3 the so called great sim racer introduced an auto rev intro before every race. Another public poll showed over 90% of Forza 3 players cant stand it and want it removed from the game.

Does this really sound like a game that is a 9.0 or higher ? Shame on the gamer mags and online mags passing on this rubbish.

Ok so back to modding your car, this is super cool! So you take your honda civic type r, and what ? This year there is no vtec that you can noticable hear kick in ? BOGUS !

So you take your honda civic with no vtec kickin in noise and think, hey this stock exhaust is ok, but im ready to upgrade to something that sound more race, you know loud and hardcore in your face. WRONG !!!

What does he mean wrong ?? Wrong, changing mods on any car do little to nothing in changing the exhaust or engine notes of any car in the game. So basically if you are running a stock air box and exhaust and change those parts to a race intake and race exhaust, the car sounds the same. O Im so sorry, did no one tell you that ?

Quick Factiod:

Did you know this week that FM3 did not make the Top 10 list of most played game online? wow check out major nelson. FM2 dominated this Top 10 list forever and a day.

Tuning

We love tuning right ? Well in FM3 many are fighting mad that you cannot tune a vehicle in online multiplayer. Yip, thats right, running in your 370Z on Suzuka East and need to strech your legs on the next long track like Silverstone or Sunset. No can do, cant tune in multiplayer. This set off the tuning community, who many love getting a group of hardcore racers in a room in xbox live party, and all of them racing around the track, making changes here and there to the car, until it reaches tuning perfection.

Sorry, thats a no go with FM3. You may not tune online, in matchmaking (<---horrible) or in private races. NO ONLINE TUNING !!

Hey Im glad those tuning guys try their hand at tuning I mean something somewhere has got to bring down the leaderboard cars. What game developer even allows such nonsense in a game. You know this is where the same car beats the stew out of every other car in its class. So you end up with everyone racing the same car. Wow, thats so cool ! Lets all race the same car everywhere so we can win, be on the leaderboards, heck I might even see if the gamertag: IdriveLeaderboardcars is available ?

Yes what im trying to say is once again the leaderboards cars dominate the pack. They clutter the leaderboard for example Track X: Times 1-100 same car lets say its Audi for example. Boring, take a lesson from Race Pro, you best know how to drive !

Enough already you say. Im only getting FM3 for the new drag strip mode. Im going to bracket race (wrong) im going to check out my timeslip and see what sorta 60 foot times i pulled (wrong) im going to put on some mean drag slicks and get traction off the line (wrong), im going to cut a good light (wrong you get a 3 2 1 countdown) Several drag racing petitions now in regards to the total and epic fail in the mode. It is not possible to have any traction with a 2wd car, they are completely useless, drag racing is dominated by the Datsun 510.

O dear, did you know you can do an engine swap in most all the cars and drivetrain swaps too. Dont like your old school mustang?  Just swap in an awd drivetrain. That Toyota Supra not handling just right, toss in an awd drivetrain ? What ? And no im not kidding, the top dog, big cheese , so called King of all racing simulators has yet again added more outrageously arcade bits to spoil the experience that once was Forza.

Factoid:

The Forza community is so gutted there is even a Forza 3 Petition from Hispanic Gamers, written in Spanish on and English forum.


How many more cars can you race in FM3, I know in FM2 you could only race 8 online, and now with the up and coming competition racing 12, 16 and more. How many cars can you race online in FM3? Answer: 8

How are the graphics of FM3 compared to something like GT5P ( the glorified demo).
So sad to say GT5P blows away the graphics in FM3. And yes I hate GT5P. Moving right along. We are now moving to our incomplete section.

One reason so many people feel the in car dashes and views turned out so poor as that fans believe the title was rushed. Lets take the Ferrari California. In GT5P the leather looked warm from the sun shinning down on it. You could smell the leather and feel it almost. In FM3 all the graphic details are inferior to GT5P and most would argue NFS Shift, and GRID smack poor old FM3 around in this area.

And if thats not bad enough, nothing on the inside of the cars in FM3 work ? Boost gauges dont work, the odometer never changes it just sits there on the same numbers, and never moves ? How lame.

While driving inside the car you get a view of the dash, that resembles some sorta old PGR4  in dash appearence. Very dated , very lame, and shame shame shame !

O Almost forgot, as if that were not enough, if you turn your joystick to look left, there is no car ? You are in nothing ! All you see is landscape and no car ? What tha ? If you look back there is nothing ?

No car, no seat, no window, no nothing. So basically you have one view that is straight ahead in which you can see a dash, every other way you look its as if you are floating on a magic carpet.  FAIL

Factiod: 

The hugely popular tournaments have been taking out of the game from FM2.

Another disappointing theme in FM3 is the rule of AWD vehicles, at release there may have been 400 cars, but if you dont have some sort of AWD setup, you will get ate for lunch. Sorry American Muscle car lovers, I sure hope your Corvette or Viper has an AWD swap option. Many of the Fords do so im sure you will be in luck,  I hope.

The Forza economy has been hit once again with several money glitches. This also adds a negative effect to the economy some people report. To be honest with so many negative things about FM3 the money glitch sadly enough was what got some people back to playing. Shame on them for gltiching though.

With what I have shared thus far. The developers of FM3 have been hit hard in their community forums with some threads reach 2,722 post and 137 pages of negative reviews and complaints, only to have the thread locked.

All ending in. This is FM3, we will not be changing any of these features, they are here to stay. Now I havent gone as far as several FM3 players, selling off their copies of the game and writting Microsoft. I read where one gamer canceled his Gold Subscription. He was so outraged he figured he would speak with his pocket book.

Does this sound like a 9.2 or 9.7 rated game to you ?

And the list of complaints, bugs, grips continue on Forza 3 the best racer of all time, lol! Many people cant stand the fact that when you are driving and shift gears, the driver of the car never moves. In other words his hands stay planted firmly on the wheel, while you are clearly power shifting and trying to chirp a tire while speed shifting. This sure does seem rushed to me, as many competitors have this feature, and they didnt get a 9.0 or higher rating ? For me it tricks my eyes at times, I shift but my drivers hands never leave the steering wheel. FAIL

Are you surprised there is no horn ? After reading this I guess your not, lol !

In Forza 3 you have the ablity to paint cars, what makes no sense to me is that the lighting is to dark, so for example if you are painting the rear bumper and want to put a bumperstick on the back saying " HONK, IF you think im sexy !" Its simply to dark to see what you are doing. Now how did this happen ? thats ok, I work for a big gaming magazine lets give them a .1 higher on our rating for that. NOT


So again there are issues with the paint mode. And a few more I wont go into detail about as it is a more advanced topic for painters.

So heaps more tracks in Forza 3 , O really ?

Basically there are more variations but with the exception of Le Mans, Fujimi Kaido, and Rally Positano. Games like Race Pro make the FM3 track selection seem bloated with the same old tracks from FM2, plus a few more mention a second ago, Sedona seems like a track for arcade lovers. V8 Supercars were added to the roster but no tracks at present added that they even race on. The track list is basically sorta gimmicky. I mean if you are hopping from Fm2 to FM3 it still feels like FM2 track wise.

The graphics are nice on what new tracks were added but the vast majority of tracks are from FM2 and it is extremely hard to tell you are not playing FM2, minus Maple Valley in which someone turned up the contrast by 45 and added another +30 to saturation. What tha ?

Overall the graphics really dont impress you that much compared to the games released at this time. Everything is nice but nothing is cutting edge, nothing is over the top awesome, like the game is marketed to be. GRID, SHIFT, and especially GT5P all have better in car graphics, with more realistic gauges and working odometers, where is FM3 to so called best racing game of all time at ? At the bottom of the stack in this category.


Factioid:
FM3 was advertised as: 'the ultimate console based racing sim'

For you hotlappers out there. Well for me I always bragged on FM2, the penalty system was just so unoffensive but so effective.  In FM3 you dont know what is going on? Hit a rumble strip no penalty but hit one somewhere else on the track and penalty. What this does is uncertify your laptime. Which means its a rubbish lap. This system is much like the crappy setup in GT5P which was a huge complaint of mine and now Ive got to scream for both games to fix it.

At the end of the day the tail end of your car may slide out on the grass a bit coming around a turn. This will uncertify your time, as you start the next lap, that entire lap is also uncertified. I have just quit the whole lap and moved on to another track so many times because of this. I never did this in FM2. Futhermore, if FM3 was a 9.0 or higher wouldnt I be playing it right now instead of sitting here discussing it.

Gone are the good ole days of FM2, sitting back racing til midnight and laughing at the competitors. FM3 is ripe to lose its crown and community, but to who. First up is GT5, one can wonder if they too will drop the ball. As GT5P was terrible.

Factoid:
No Logitech Wheel Support

Okay moving right along. Where you hoping there will be a pitcrew in FM3 ? Answer, NO ! There is not a pit crew. You pit, aero damage is not fixed but hurts performance. But who fixed all this ? The invisible pit crew, odd though, I didnt read anything in the 2 page instruction manual that came with the game that said the pitcrew had cloaking devices ?

In FM3 street cars can be moddified to enter into R3 Class racing in which they dominate the races and leaderboards leaving the R3 Class worthless. Why ?

Factiod:
The repetition of old tracks in FM3 has really ruined the fun factor for some.

Is there weather in FM3 'the ultimate console based racing sim' ?
NO

There is no rain, no night, no snow, nothing but day.


IN FM3 we have cat and mouse, and you know some are requesting Car Soceer ? Im not a drifter as I love to circuit race, but guess what there is no smoke in the game? You could drift for a complete mile and get no smoke, you could do a burnout for 25 minutes and still see nothing, well maybe a puff of smoke and you would have to save a replay, and the play it again and pause it , pull out a magnifying glass and look closely to see if indeed it is smoke you see. LAME

How are the servers?

My experience so far is that lag is about 10 times worse. Now I experienced this in FM2. In a whole nights racing you would come across someone whos car was zipping around unrealistically.

With FM3 its a bad deal. About 60% of the time for me in an online matchmaking or private race most of the cars will be doing one of the following things:

Dribbling: bouncing up and down like a basketball while navigating around the track
Hovering: A sorta star wars kinda thing where the car is above the ground floating around the track on air.
Gophering: A car races around the track with half its body above the road and the other half submerged.

FM3 'the ultimate console based racing sim' <-- Are you kidding me ? This is not realistic, online racing with all this lag is more like a sci fi racer gone wrong.

Hows the auction house ?
What a cool feature but in FM2. In FM3 it takes a long time to load, and the cars in auction are harder to see, and the smallest LCD I own is a 40 inch. BOO !

For me the auction house is a notch down. They should have kept it simple but now its slow, takes a long time to load, and you cant see the cars very well, im disappointed.

Speaking of Loading times

Do you ever get to race in this game ?

You jump online in a lousy hopper, again you have no control, you cant pick where you want to race or whats going on, your just along for the ride, no control ! So you search for a hopper that has the class you want to race and you wait, and wait, and wait. Many people complain there will be people in the class they want to race in but are dumped into a room in which they are the only racer ? ha !!

So you keep at it wasting time until you end up in a room with other players. You wait for the race to finish. Then once its finished you wait for intermission. Then get involved in a boot player battle, or skip track check a thon. Both lame options and a waste of time. Not to mention with this new system the percentage of people using mics have dropped. Anyways you finally get your car selected and wait, you have to wait more while the game loads the race which takes ages.

I hate commericals but you wait so long between races I wish there were ads on the screen or something to keep me occupied. BUMMER

Then you get in the race, no one talks, and this time around your more likely to get punted off the track by arcade racers that like to autobrake, and ram. And there you go, off the track spinning while some car passes by dribbling up and down like a basketball, and the car that crashed you keeps on floating down the track like a magic carpet.

I could seriously continue on all night about this game. Sure there are some postive things about FM3. Sure its fun, and you can enjoy the in car views and race a bit, but the biggest disappointment is the game has lost its magic.

I will continue on playing this title but it is not worthy to be a 9.0 anything and in my opinion high 8's out of 10 would be severely pushing it.

Online Multiplayer has crippled the title, and with major things missing from the game like system link, tuning in online lobbies, local leaderboards the game falls so far short of an A.

Included Links: Please make and educated deceision before going out and paying top dollar on a game. As a consumer we pay for a finished product , and FM3 is much like paying for the total bill for half a meal. Its just simply not all here, the game feels more like a FM2.5, and many gaming deceisions have spoiled the title and community.

LINKS

Official Multiplayer Feedback Thread

System link: Why was it removed?

Requesting information and providing feedback

An open letter

Top Three Gripes

Auto revving animation poll

Petition for a stickier drag strip

***Petition*** Multiplayer Improvements

fixing the Multiplayer by speaking with you wallet.




I sincerely hope that consumers will be able to make a more educated deceision upon purchase than going in and spending hard earned money blindly.

IGN USER Review Rating
Game: Forza Motorsports 3 -  Rating: 5.7 as of Nov 22, 2009