Be Excellent To Each Other

Say what you like about the UI design in the Forza games, it can't possibly be worse than the ones in the WWE wrestling games. I'VE ALREADY TOLD YOU WHERE TO SAVE FFS!

Aha - you can see what you're up against by pressing "Y" for series standings at least.

You still have to back out to buy a new car or manually upgrade though.

You can however list the cars you can afford in PI order rather than having to go through all the manufacturers now so a couple of plus points there.

Oh god, yes. The interface of the one I played was so bad I sold it after one play. It didn't help that the game was infuriating and shit, of course.

Can you set it so it only buys handling upgrades or does it just buy everything?

It's no good asking him, he's in the smoke watching Firefly.
I've just got in after a boozy lunch and I have this so I might put it on and do destruction derby

I've seen no option to pick and choose so far although to be fair once I realised it was charging me a small fucking fortune I stopped using it and went back to my old FM2 technique of going maxed out weight reduction then adding a few bits and bobs depending on the course.

Auto upgrade is all or nothing, it would be better if you could perhaps de-select some of the suggested upgrades to save some cash. But ho-hum.

By and large, I'm enjoying it. All of the cars feel good, the new tracks look fantastic (although there's one that's a bastard due to the shadows the cars cast playing in bumper cam mode). 60 fps really helps to give the game a real sense of speed. The menus really are shit (and very bright!) but they're no worse than FM2.

There seems to be more R3/R2/R1 cars than the previous version, wonder if there's more of an emphasis on that element of the game?

I played this a bit today and unfortunately it just irritated me. Yes the graphics look nicer, but the menus, the announcer, the music and most of all, the loading times just annoyed me.

May be Im being stupid, blind or both, but I couldnt easily find anywhere where I could change my button config. Also, are there no arcade type races in this one as there were in 2? My favourite single player mode of 2 was the time trials, but I cant seem to find a similar mode on this game. The free race or whatever its called is probably the closest I found.

During the actual season mode I had absolutely no feeling of progress or idea of what I was actually trying to achieve. This was partly down to me just pressing A as fast as I could to get to the next but partly because everything just felt empty and isolated.

As much as Perkies hates the rewind function, this has proved a godsend to me. There were numerous times, far more than I remember from FM2 of the AI bashing me off the road into a spin, I think if it wasnt for the rewind function I wouldve thrown the game in the bin.[citation needed]

I really do hope the online modes are awesome.

Perhaps you're just out of practice? It has been a while, you weren't nearly as lethally good as you used to be during the farewell races. Indeed, not so much bloody Ramsea as FLABBY Ramsea.

I am sure your skills will return!

How do I turn the cunt off?

That's Mr Narrator Cunt to you. Don't worry he'll fuck off into the background pretty soon and you'll only hear from him every now and again.

If he annoys you too much I think you can turn him down in the Audio menu. Along with in race muzak.

*gleeful handclap*

Is he the same cunt from NFS: SHIT?

Definitely worth installing the first disc to your HDD - that tends to scythe the load times down to a much more tolerable length.

Not at all. He's not a whooping American; he sounds like Movie Trailer Voiceover Guy more than anything else. The only bit that annoyed me (and then only slightly) is that the game pauses and makes you listen to him telling you about the race structure, but only for a total of about three minutes during your first hour with the game.

I'm liking this, mainly for the gameplay, which feels a lot more forgiving that the first. Call me a charlatan but I like the auto tune function - it saves a lot of faffing around, though I still wish you could buy bloody cars without having to exit out of the race mode entirely - however, as MEATY says it's a lot faster when installed so not a biggie. Had some fun with my nephew online who was bragging about his Focus RS with an RS200 engine as well as his stripped out Cayenne with 849BHP. He challenged me to a drag race. I showed up with a Veyron and pwned him both times

I think, as someone else has already mentioned, that the quicktune function will prove a godsend in online races. I propose a week by week basis where someone gets to nominate the car, class and tracks for the first 2 or three races before it gets opened to suggestion by all the people playing.

So, me first. I want to see E92 BMW M3s autotuned up to A class. Tracks? Mugello, Silverstone F1 circuit and Catalunya. All assists off, wheels only if you have them and five laps per race. Tuesday night anyone?

Oof. If the Gentleman Club is going to start insisting on all assists off, I'm certainly not buying this game.

I only ever drive with Traction Control. And I fully plan to play this with the full on manual with clutch shifting.

Horrible little tracks to start off with, naff all overtaking.

Ahh, suddenly a decent one, and a first place

Are you being sarcastic?

I found the secret at the start was to get past at least the first four cars in the first few corners on those tracks. It is doable as I won all those tracks - might have taken a few attempts but it can be done.

On some of the earlier stages where you use autotune/upgrade to optimise your car you frequently don't get anything to tweak on the car except the tyre pressure. Any of you using the VX220 Turbo in the C Class races will find it a lot less understeery if you drop the tyre pressures to 29psi from 30. Most cars benefit from this which is the same as Forza 2.

It's not set in stone. Some people prefer driving without them. I suppose the idea is to make it as level a playing field as possible so if you play with a controller with all assists on and you're winning everything then it would only be fair to handicap you a little bit to level things off, no? Let's make that adjustable then.

It's not applying class limits properly - on at least two of the side-series so far, it's had a class on the image, but the restriction is just "gotta be a coupe" (or whatever) - in that particular case, the only car I had suitable was an S class Ferrari, against C class. Off and away, before the first corner!

But that's okay as the AI are still cheating rammy fucks for the most part (though it's refreshing when they do over-cook it into a corner, or move out of the way, or ram each other). The Nurburgring sub-series was the "best" for that - twice I had fucks immediately drive straight me off the line. I try very very hard to race properly (and I'm finally starting to make progress on the "not driving into the back of the early braking eejits" front) but when they shunt me quite unnecessarily, it's on.

I'm all for the quick upgrades at this stage - I'm in for setting a time on every race, before going back to improve poor times and settling into multiplayer.

I love it. It's Forza 2, but better.

Edit: Other bugs: some dashboards, particularly the Reventon, get colour distortion when Live pops up to say someone's come online. Minor.

Physics still cause the frame rate to jitter - as I suspected, "solid 60fps" is a lie again.

When/while it loads a music track (off disc, I only made enough space to install disc 1 as well last night), the car sounds get stuck.

One corner on the Amalfi coast (turning from sun-behind to sun-ahead) causes it to jitter really badly every time.

It's quite possible, of course, that these are all indicators of the game slowly murdering my box, as I predicted it surely must.

That was the bit I was fucking good at. If we were playing online and I had a couple of hours or so with a car beforehand to do my tuning, I would do my normal 'drive it like a spanner' in the races, and win.
Now, to achieve the same, you can 'press Y'.
Grr.

It doesn't always provide a great car, I've got a couple (my R3 Reventon, for example, having been awarded no R class cars at all yet but needing one for season 5) that are well short of the class limit, and it's very sub-optimal in some of its choices (my Reventon, for example, is a flat out missile in a straight line, but it hates hates hates a corner. Though that's maybe impossible to fix). I'm looking forward to tweaking to better my times, particularly where I'm not in the top 1000 of the global leaderboard, which is currently nicely rare.

I only ever drove in chase-cam with AT and a braking line in Forza 2. For some reason I just couldn't get on with turning those assists off.

In Forza 3, I've started right from the beginning with MT, no suggested line at all, and bumper cam. Still a few dodgy moments when I'm not familiar with a corner but it's so much more satisfying I'm amazed I'd never got into it before.

Early races have seen me take that black beetle and then be sat behind the next three cars as they crawl round three abreast, braking a good few feet before they need to. All the while I'm being dinged in the back by the Beetle. I can fucking drive down the A48M if I want that sort of thing to happen, I don't need a game for it.

AI is on medium - I'm wondering if I shouldn't try the early races again with easy and hard AI to see the difference - medium seems OK once you get onto decent tracks, as the weekend championship races I'm finding are giving me enough track and race time to win.

I've had the braking line on so far out of interest as opposed to actually sticking to it, it's a very conservative line at times and at others deviating from it will guarantee I come a cropper. All in all though a very tasty update. The main problem is shunts from inept drivers, I'm losing points in the end of race totaliser thing through no fault of my own.

I'm all about the in-car cam this time, after bumper in F2. It's lovely. I still need the braking line, but I'm increasingly finding (like last time) it's of decreasing value - some corners need more earlier, some need much less, later. Other than that, no AIDS (though it's clutching, get fucked if I'm doing that as well).

I poured quite a few hours into this over the weekend and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Playing with AT and TCS, no braking line or other assists and AI on medium and bumper cam (with an occassional flick to cabin cam to see how the interiors look.

It took a while through the first set of smaller shunt-athon tracks to get golds, those cheaty shunty AI bastards all had it in for me. Just onto my first A Class series.

I'm not sure where I stand on the auto-upgrade debate, excellent for Gentlemen's Racing as it will hopefully mean that more of it will happen. I guess it's as involved as you want it to be, the auto upgrades certainly can't be providing the 'best' settings as that would mean that they've effectively removed a huge chunk of the game for some people.

As for DBSnappa's suggestion, I'd be up for this. So long as I can get a reasonable internet connection sorted this evening I'll be on line tomorrow night. (I'm not holding out much hope though)

I wonder if the main failing of the last iteration has been cured... I use a wheel and that's the only way I seem to be able to control my cars remotely well in a race, however I find the thing utterly useless for menus - try doing decals with a wheel, or changing tuning. I would have assumed in Forza 2 MS would have allowed me to have controller 2 as a joystick that works in the menu system, even when C1 is the wheel. As is stands I've needed to power down the wheel, unplug the bastard because the transformer squeals if it's not connected to anything (same as the 360 psu) and then reconnect the pad. Sometimes it takes longer to handle the hardware than it does to make the changes, but using the wheel for them would take longer again. Most frustrating, I hope this time they've realised the limitations of their otherwise excellent bit of kit.

Hang on, which wheel have you got - the Logitech one has all the pad buttons in the middle of it, I assumed they all did. ?

Microsoft Wheel. I can use it for the menus but it is ungainly, imprecise and lacks the analogue controls. Turning the wheel to resize and position decals, for example, is a miserable experience. I couldn't imagine designing one with the wheel.

The official MS one does too but you have no right stick so the painting interface is unusable. I don't recall if the tuning interface needs right stick too.

Also, what GY said; it seems obvious to me to let player 2's pad control the menus so you can just pick up and put down the pad as necessary.

It's not going to do a perfect job, in the same way that the braking lines are conservative, the perfect lines are only sometimes right, the traction control is too aggressive and stops you shaking the tail loose, and so on. Plus, it won't let you tweak the car to your style (I've always had best results out of a loose tail, to the point where I shift the weight and power distribution of 4WDs towards the rear a little, and fiddle with brake balance so I have a light tail as I trail brake into corners).

I've noticed this too. It struck me as curious.

I dislike the TCS in Forza, at least on the earlier cars. It's too aggressive which just seems to result in massive understeer on any 4WD or RWD car. On the other hand, I cannot cope without ABS, particularly playing on a pad; the difference between "braking enough for the corner" and "locked up the wheels" is approximately 1mm.

SRSLY? The clutch strikes me as a bridge too far. If I can't feel where the bite point is from pedal pressure, what the fuck is the point?

In practice, the mixture of skills across the Gentlemen's Club is so huge we are never going to have a truly competitive race. Maybe one or two of the top tier folk can consistently battle it out for first, I'll be down in seventh scrapping for sixth place with Dimrill, or something. As such, I don't think we should generally mandate assists on or off; let people pick and let the weaker players use them as a handicap for the better players.

On the other hand, as a pure novelty, I demand an all-assists-off race in TVR Speed 12s. The competition will be to simply keep it pointed in one direction for longer than thirty seconds. Oh, and you'll be wanting manual gears, so you can completely avoid first and second (as they are nothing but wheelspinning messes).

Try ABS off with the wheel - I've found it better this time, by a long shot to the point I can consistently brake later, harder and better without locking up like I can with ABS. Not saying it'll be right for you, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much better it feels.

Fine, I'll sit back and watch the pair of you duke it out in front of me then!

I wish there was some sort of feel through the pedals on these steering wheels. That'd be cool.

Hmm. Admittedly, finely modulating the pedal is a lot easier than doing it on the trigger. Maybe I will try it.

Yeah, that's the main problem I have with the brake - I end up with it pressed down to the carpet if I'm going into a corner a bit fast, which doesn't really help matters.

Having got fairly used to breaking with no ABS on Forza 2, I'm finding breaking with no ABS on this much harder to judge.

Also: Driving round new tracks you don't know in a race - a bit tricky.

Sunday morning I watched Grim... panic brake a Range Rover (in Forza 3, I should point out) with both feet on the brake pedal.

This is why I use the "braking line" assist. I actually ignore the line, I just want the colour coding; if that line isn't orange-fading-to-red then I'm too fast or too conservative.

I used the braking line a lot in Forza 2, and never really felt I got to learn the tracks, instead finding myself just blindly following that colourful line.

If I get Forza 3, I'm going to turn it off from the beginning. I don't care if I crash many times and don't win all the races straight away, I think I'll be a better driver and get far more enjoyment out of the game without it.

I ended up doing that as well. I am increasingly tempted to get Forza 3, even more so if race nights are going to take off again. I'd need to put in some practice, mind, so that I can be just a bit shit instead of totally fucking shit.

I'm concerned that I've been playing Outrun too much in the last week and will be expecting FM3 to perform perfectly controlled powerslides instead of walloping off into the scenery on every other corner.

This is what I've done and the game is so much more satisfying. You actually feel like you're a racing driver, rather than someone playing Train Simulator.

Nah. You could always tell who had the breaking line on when racing the nurburgring, as huge swathes of the track had red lines where you should take it flat out. Same thing applied to lots of other tracks I did abnormally well on, but to a slightly lesser degree.

The line is no substitute for learning the tracks.

I'm now taking to practicing a track before racing.

I did the BMW owners club races at the weekend and bought a Z4M for it and then had shitloads of fun letting the back end slip out round pretty much every corner. Not quite Outrun 2 levels of drift but I reckon I'll have a go at the 100,000 drift point achievement soon it was that much of a laugh.

I think I'm going to whack the AI up to hard as it's not been much of a challenge so far once you get past the initial jostling on lap 1.

Same here. Played all of FM2 with braking line on. Decidied to bin it off for FM3 and haven't looked back. I'm also pleasantly suprised by how well* I know the old tracks. Finding it more fun without the line.



*Not very!

I remind you that you played it all weekend, I rocked up and beat your time around Laguna Seca on my third lap.