“Fundamental movement” – Forza Motorsport 2

**Forza Motorsport 2** (Turn 10/Microsoft, Xbox 360, 2007)

Way back when I was playing through 1995 I talked about how the way the games industry is organised, with rival console exclusives, leads to both a general unwelcome culture of consumerist rivalry and an opportunity for inferior games to succeed. The example I used was Super International Cricket, since it was hard to see other explanations for its success in the face of the high quality Brian Lara Cricket. Forza Motorsport 2 is a glimpse of a more positive aspect to the same phenomenon. That is, without the existence of Sony and Microsoft as rivals with their own consoles to make games for, it’s difficult to imagine there being room for a game both so similar to Gran Turismo and so good.

Forza Motorsport 2 is split into arcade and career modes, though the handling never leans particularly to the arcade and sticks at the simulation end of things, like in Gran Turismo. The career mode has you racing a wide selection of real life cars in carefully specified series of events to earn money to improve those cars and buy new ones, like in Gran Turismo. It doesn’t force you to earn licences through a series of miniature challenges, but it does set a big swathe of early game races on different layouts of the same test track, which is rather similar in spirit.

Its position on the Xbox 360 does give it some ways of standing out from existing Gran Turismo games. First is, as with many games of this period, the graphical upgrade. A lot of detail is present and correct and genuinely helps the fine moments of picking out braking points and handling changing camber. It does lack a little flair in the beauty department compared to the sunlight-dappled wonder of Gran Turismo 3, but add in the chance to minutely specify the colour and design of your favourite vehicle and it has a lot to look at.

The other thing the console adds compared to the PS2 is the analogue triggers on its controllers. Going from a world of pressing X to accelerate and square to brake to one of squeezing RT to accelerate and LT to brake is a big change for such a detail-oriented subgenre. After getting the hang of the basic forward wheel drive cars, I took to the rear wheel drive events in a classic Jaguar and was unsurprised to be spinning and sliding all over the place. Learning to gradually ease pressure onto the accelerator and harness all of the car’s brute power while keeping it pointing in the right direction took a while. Along the way, though, it felt like a more rewarding and less frustrating experience than I was used to when feathering via rapidly pressing and letting go of a button.

There are a few further new ideas. Its adjustable difficulty, where you get greater rewards for completing races using fewer of its assists (Supergiant games style) helps to speed up the career mode and give some incentives to explore in a different direction. The lap-time penalty system for cutting corners is a clever addition to time trials. There are a remarkable range of options for on-screen telemetry showing live details of all aspects of your car and driving, should you wish to risk losing the map of the circuit that’s otherwise there. Bump into things and damage to your car is both visual and felt in performance issues, which is the game’s most obvious case of doing something specifically because Gran Turismo 4 still didn’t.

All are impressive details, but not the big reason why Forza Motorsport 2 succeeds. That is simply that it gets you a regular flow of new cars and makes driving each one of them an individual and enjoyable experience. Nothing is much reinvented from the Gran Turismo series, but it stands up alongside it when it comes to how driving feels. In the divided market of PlayStation and Xbox, Forza and Gran Turismo were not directly competing with each other but were also one fixture in a much bigger competition, and Forza Motorsport 2 was Microsoft taking the lead again.