Tag Archives: Forza

This is a trend that has been bugging me for an incredibly long time, being that of offering exclusive pre-order content depending on where you purchase a game. Gamestop is clearly the biggest perpetrator of this fuckery.

As I live in New Zealand, anything being offered by Gamestop exclusively is, by default, unobtainable for me. EB Games on the other-hand usually have a similar offer but at a generally higher price than my preferred retailers. This is where things become an annoyance, for example, in Forza 3′s case, there was a Gamestop Exclusive Downloadable Car being released as a pre-order offer, the 2010 Audi R8 V10 to be more specific.

Now, sure, it’s a pretty sweet looking car, coming pre-tuned with an awesome custom paint job. I would definately love to race the thing around in Forza 3, but unlike Gamestop it wasn’t available as an EB Games pre-order offer, and even if it was, you wouldn’t see me driving an hour to the closest EB store to pay for it, go home without it, and go back on release day. Not only do EB have higher prices, they don’t deliver on release day, meaning I would have to spend an additional $20+ in gas to pick the damn thing up. Do not want.

Forza 3 obviously isn’t the only game to have a ridiculous ‘Retailer Exclusive Pre-Order Offer’, other titles that have followed suit in this shit include Assassin’s Creed 2, Halo 3: ODST, [PROTOTYPE], Dead Space, Far Cry 2, and many others.

The content offered in these Pre-Order deals range from in-game content, such as armour permutations, characters, locations & maps etc.. to physical goodies such as figurines, posters, and books. In no way am I saying that it’s a bad thing that these extras are being offered as pre-order gifts, though restricting where they are offered is just plain greed.

Personally, I don’t mind the additional goodies being offered in Limited/Collectors Editions (ie. Lunchboxes, art books, party hats) but it just pisses me off when they start holding back parts of the game such as locations, levels, characters, and models for certain retailers. Game Marketers, keep the in-game content the fucking same, no matter where you pre-order it. It’s that simple.

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Video games have come a long way since the days of black & white side-scrollers and 8-bit platformers. In fact, over the course of the last 30 years, standards in graphical detail and animation have evolved exponentially to a point that could be described as “quasi-realistic”. Environments almost feel as good as being there, explosions sometimes cause you to instinctively step back a bit and interacting with characters is the closest thing to conversing with a real life android, or at least someone who never learned how to blink and needs mechanical implants to close their eyelids. We are on the verge of being able to have virtual experiences that could be mistaken for real life, but there are still a few things that remain to be mastered.

I think Mario still has the upper hand with jumping animations.

I have no real complaints in terms of textures and modeling; developers these days can create objects with immense amounts of detail with seemingly little effort. Although you need a fucking $20,000 computer to achieve these realistic renderings whilst maintaining a decent frame rate. In fact, it is this trade-off that has hindered the progression of graphical technology. Developers cut corners and make use of illusionist techniques to reduce the strain on the computer hardware and improve playability. To achieve true realism, a game needs to have both ultra-high detail and a constantly smooth frame rate.

The main reason games don’t seem realistic is because animations are too…well…good. This paradox applies to animated movies as well; since they have the power to make the objects do whatever they want, producers make their movements and actions as perfect as possible. This results in slow, smooth motions that you would never see in real life. Even real goddamn robots are not perfectly rigid, except for maybe those arms that make the Intel chips, they are precision personified. In terms of games, we see characters in constant animated loops, wiping their noses every ten seconds in the same exact way. Cut-scenes are unbearable as I feel I’m watching a cartoon, even if pre-rendered as opposed to using the game engine, for the same reasons regarding movies.

Racing games are slightly different. Since there are barely any animations to speak of, it’s all about the environment and the camera. When we watch a reply of a race, or even a replay in a sports game, we naturally expect the same appearance as a TV broadcast. When the difference is easily discernible, we lose immersion. In sports games and racing games, the camera is designed to precisely follow the ball or car. In real life, a cameraman can never keep the object in question perfectly in the center of the screen. Games require a level of “artificial imperfection” to replicate this effect, and fortunately I noticed a hint of this in the Gran Turismo 5 trailer at E3 this year:

I will admit that watching that trailer was the first time I actually felt like I was watching a real TV broadcast. Maybe not the entire video, but definitely from 1:04 to 1:23. The subtle shake as the cars rushed by the camera goes an incredibly long way to making the game feel realistic, even if only during replays.

To make a direct comparison with what I feel is the best looking racing game available right now, Forza 3, Gran Turismo 5 has a major advantage in one seemingly insignificant area. One of the few things that prevents Forza from looking realistic is depth of field, or its lack thereof. Forza implements an infinite depth of field, meaning that objects are rendered in focus regardless of their distance from the camera. This results in distant trees occupying a cluster pixels, creating a less that attractive flickering effect. In Gran Turismo, those same trees would be blurred, eliminating the effect and maintaining realism.

So, my message to game developers is this: stop with the textures and put a little fucking effort into animation. We get it, you can make a trashcan out of four billion polygons and bump-map it with photo-realistic textures, but your garbageman looks like about as agile and lifeless as a Thanksgiving Day parade float. To EA Tiburon, you better stop wasting time making pre-game parking lot cut-scenes that make me want to mash my controller’s A button with my eyeball and actually make the player animations fluid and dynamic. Your PRO-TAK technology is shit.

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