• 19Dec 09

  Somehow Forza Motorsport 3 Makes Me Feel Bored

  As a console racing game, Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3) is an outstanding sequel of its critical acclaimed 2007 predecessor. Besides the realistic physical model and driving, the newly built minimalistic user interface gives a clean and neat sense of this product. The main bulk of the gaming, the career mode, is also improved in many ways. For example, players have more freedom of choosing events to race. Implementing a calender in race seasons is a smart move. This prints a sense of time progressing in one's mind when he or she is playing as a professional race driver. Of course, there are more improvements like the amazing painting mechanism still works pretty good, if not better, as before.
  
  However, when I reached Driver Level 20, I couldn't help wondering, "Why do I feel bored?" This is a great racing game, and I do enjoy it, there is no doubt about that. The problem is, the more I play, the more boredom I feel during the progress of the career mode. Everything becomes very repetitive: I start a weekday event, win it, and then move on to another weekday event. On the weekend, I race in one of the series of weekend event, and I win and keep carrying on the loop. To some point of time, the season overs, and I am granted a new achievement.
  
  I think a key is still lost in the gaming mechanism here. Indeed, the calender gives a sense of time flowing during the progress of a career, but it isn't associated with any daily experience of racing. For example, assuming we are playing a Formula One racing game, like F1 2009, it's easy to understand how the race goes in a race season. There is the context. We are aware of the context well if we've already been a fan and kept tracking Formula One on news papers, TV broadcast, or the F1 official site in real lives.
  
  On the contrary, I saw these events in FM3 and understood them as parts of the gaming, but I couldn't associate them with any thing I knew or experienced outside of this game (here I refer to the events exclusively, not the cars). In the example of F1 above, presumably Jenson Button won several races in the first half of the season in 2009, I could plan my strategies to catch him in the following races, if the developer did the right things. Without the familiar context to be associated with, soon it will be just a pursue of records, achievements, and unlocking cars, tracks, or whatever else.
  
  Still, I love racing games. I love to improve my time lap by lap, with difference cars and settings. As for this aspect, FM3 is so brilliant, and I just can't stop doing this. So, interestingly, I spend more time on hotlap (time attack) rather than the career both in FM2 and FM3, maybe that's even true for all other serious racing games. Even I drive a specific car on a specific circuit, while trying to improve my time in each lap, the experience is always changing, manipulating, and stacking. This is something that never makes me feel bored in racing games.

  • Posted Dec 19, 2009 9:01 am PT
  • Category: Games
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