If you know me even slightly well, you know that I'm in love with cars. I haven't been up to snuff since I entered university, but my love for cars has definitely not left me.

It stands to reason then, that I would buy Forza 3. I dumped hooooooours into Forza 2 and I just about did a back flip when I got my copy of 3 in the mail.

I've been racing, yes, and I'm pretty darn good too (usually in the top 1% -- not bad for using fulling auto ) but I've been spending a lot of time painting my cars and taking pictures of them which is more than a little addictive. I've been trying to upload videos to forzamotorsport.net but like a lot of people, it just hasn't been working.

In any case I thought I'd share with you my baby of the moment. It's a Lotus Evora, and man is it a pretty car. In general I'm a fan of Lotus as they take small engines and get amazing performance out of them, and in my opinion, make some of the best handling cars on the planet. After I realized I was definitely going to drive this car for a long time, I thought I'd spruce it up. After I found some cool vinyls of a chick from Evangelion, I painted up the rest of the car around her. The result is pretty cool, and if I really wanted it to be awesome I could spend more time on the tear effects, but I'm too lazy.

Enough with the talking, here she is! (Note you should probably click on the picture to see the full size shot for the best quality).

So there you have it! I hope none of you thought my girlfriend and I got pregnant or something...although I suppose it may have made for an more interesting blog. I'll be trying to post some more now that some of the tougher tests are out of the way in school, so don't miss me too much.

Have a good one!

I'm what you might call a car guy. This is not to be mistaken for a gear-head, but I'm knowledgeable in just about every other aspect with cars thanks to my dad drilling it in to me throughout my childhood. I absolutely love cars, and so you can imagine I'm pretty in love with a good racing game as well. While I'll play just about any racing game, I like a pure arcade, or a pure sim, because the purgatory of the racing genre is an ugly, ugly place indeed. Recently both the Forza 3 and NFS SHIFT demos were put up on the xbox live marketplace, and so I quickly jumped on both of them to see how the compared. I have been interested in SHIFT ever since EA announced it, because I honestly was curious as to how a NFS game could possibly become a driving sim. I also have Forza 3 CE fully paid off on pre-order, so that should tell you how I feel about that series. I assure you that won't skew my views on SHIFT, as in reality, if both were good, I'd buy them both. Here's how they fared in my eyes:

NFS SHIFT

The demo is very much NFS. The presentation and narrator/cool foreign accent dude kick it off, giving you your car options and even giving you pointers on how to attack the course you're about to race. This is all very well done, and to be honest, it kind of made me feel bad #@$. I immediately turned all assists off (because that's how I race in Forza as well) and jumped into the Viper (my favorite car of all time). Now, Forza is widely known for its realistic handling and physics, and so I had in mind that this would be relatively the same deal. It was not however, and it wasn't exactly for the better. Outside of the Viper's already horrendous handling and torque steer, the car was barely driveable. It kind of felt like I was in a constant state of hydroplaning. The handling was really jerking and squirrely (again, waaay more so above and beyond what you'd expect from a Viper) and I actually had to quit out. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I'm a pretty damn good driver. People are usually surprised when they find out I'm using a controller and not a wheel because I have great precision. I'm usually in the top 5% of drivers for lap times in forza, and so needless to say, not being able to drive well in SHIFT was a bit of a hit to the ego.

In any case, I backed out, and turned the settings from Pro to Expert, which turned on ABS and set the TC to low. I also moved from the Viper to the GTR for its all wheel drive, and superior handling ability just so I knew I'd be able to actually finish a race. I jumped back in to the London track, and low and behold the car was manageable. It was still squirrelly as all hell, but I could at least keep it relatively smooth through corners. The game has an odd way of dealing with low speed corners, and low-medium acceleration out of them. It's like all cars at 1/4 throttle are rocket propelled and so instantly want to do a 360. Maybe it was me, but that's what it seemed like across all the cars I drove.

The problem with SHIFT is that it's a NFS game trying to be a racing sim. It still handles and drives basically like NFSMW with a driver's license, and so it makes attacking the game as a sim very difficult indeed. I don't think I could be anything but the "aggressive" driver with SHIFT, and to be honest I don't think I could beat it with damage set to realistic, without serious stress.

On the up side, the presentation is actually nice. It's not GT5 or anything (neither is Forza 3, for that matter) but it's very much in the NFS vein. The car sounds a pretty good, although I think maybe a bit too exaggerated. After 5 starring both events and unlocking the Zonda F, driving it sounded like a jet engine being grinded up in another jet engine. In reality the car does sound like a muffled Indy car, true, but not nearly as violent as SHIFT portrays it.

Overall it seems like a decent sim. If you tune the settings to play it like you would any other NFS game I think you'll probably enjoy it WAY more than if you attempt to play it as a sim.

Forza 3

I played an unholy amount of Forza 2, and before my friend took my copy away from me, I was closing in on having bought every car in the game, and finish up the last few races to get all the achievement points. Needless to say I was pretty excited to get my hands on the third installment, and while mechanically it isn't a quantum leap, what the game promises in its feature set has me totally pumped.

The demo has only one track, and a handful of cars to choose from, including the ever advertised Audi R8 V10. Instinctively I hoped into the Audi first, turned off all the assists, and went to work. If you've played Forza 2, then you're going to basically be right at home in 3. The game handles very much the same (for obvious reasons). You will notice, however, that the game feels a bit floatier. This isn't the same floaty that SHIFT had, this is more of an on ice feel. This partially depends on the car you're driving, but it's also because the game handles more realistically overall. It won't take you more than one or two races to adjust to the sensation, and you'll find it more natural than Forza 2.

The AI is still massively tough, and if you want to beat a car with a higher ranking number, you'll have to really know what you're doing in the corners. Personally, I'm a bit hit or miss in the corners unless I'm super used to a car, and so my best against the hard difficulty AI was 3rd, and 2nd against the medium setting. The rewind feature is a HUGE help in a game like this, and while many purists will want to throw holy water at the thing, many of us mortals will be forever grateful for its inclusion. I may be good, but there's nothing more frustrating than butchering the very first corner in a race, or tanking one on lap 7 of 8, only to lose your position for good.

Presentation wise, Forza 3 looks beautiful. Granted, it's no GT 5, but it's no slouch either. If you're super picky (and I can be sometimes) you'll notice that the lack of proper lighting has forced the team to over saturate the color of the cars. This is a non-issue in GT5, but to be honest it's not a big deal. If anything, it plays to Forza's overall feel and character. The only gripe I really have with the graphics is the lack of enough AA. I LOVE the 60FPS, but it kind of kills me to see a jaggy grill on a car.

There are an infinite number of features not available in the demo, and if you're interested in the game you probably already know about all of them. There is no doubt in my mind that this will be a fantastic game.

So there you have it. Have any of you played the demos? What do you think of NFS' entering into the sim racing ring?

That's all for now! Have a good one,

XR

Ok so I've gotten tired of ComputerPlayer1 as my gamertag. Not only does it not come across as what I thought it would to many people, but it just doesn't seem super original. I have 800 points kicking around from purchasing 1943, and so this is a good a time as any to spend some points. There aren't really any arcade games out or coming out that I'm interested in so whatever.

I've thought of a couple and checked their availability. I'll list them here, and I'd love to hear your opinions on them. Also, if you can think of something else you think might suit me, then let me know!

So far I have...

Teh Suxor
TheSwedishChef (the best muppet character ever)
Mysterious Fox (in tribute to Giantbomb's endurance run)
Captain Canuck
Lonely Tylenol (props to those who can figure this out lol)

 
 
EDIT: It's unfortunate, but even though TheSwedishChef was not taken on xbox live, it is apparently taken on the Zune network. I had no idea that MS kept names across xbox live, games for windows live, and the zune network, and so unfortunately the chef, along with Lonely Tylenol, Mysterious Fox, AND Captain Canuck are all unusable. This is annoying, but not entirely surprising. I won't use Teh Suxor, so here's a couple of names I tried and can in fact use:
 
Robot Ninja Fox
Canuck Cavalry
 
Thanks for all your help in voting so far everyone! I got way more attention over this than I figured I would. I am deeply saddened I can't use TheSwedishChef....I wanted to run up and tea bag people upon killing them and yell BORK BORK BORK into the mic. Oh well.  Tell me what you think of the two new names if you would, or if you have more names to suggest I'll try those out too!
 

Have a good one!

Dear, sweet mother of @#%@#%^@%$^$#$#^$#^$@#^$#^@%^$%^$%. I have never been so stressed out and/or frustrated in all my life.

Last night whilst browsing the interwebs, I looked at my CPU temperature and noticed it looked a bit high for what it should be with my Vendetta 2 heatsink. I had had the guys at the shop re apply paste already, but it still seemed to be idling a bit high. This had bothered me for a while, but I only really got struck with the urge to do something about it 24 hours ago.

I promptly searched around to see what different methods of applying the paste there were. After much searching I stumbled across this wondeful little tutorial type deal that walks you through several techniques this guy tried before finding the best solution. I said to myself, "Self, how hard could this possibly be?" MAN was I stupid hahaha.

So I sat in class all day, thinking about how awesome it will be to pull off the heatsink and do it myself, woefully unaware of the torture I was about to put myself through.

Anyway, I got home, and took out my old computer to practice a bit with dissmantling a heatsink. This would prove to be futile, as it was an AMD processor (they mount differently) and in a much less busy case. I moved on anyway, and begain the delicate operation.

I knew within the first 10 minutes that this would not be the quick in and out I was hoping for. Even in my fairly spacious tower, and with a motherboard that is set up to more or less be a lesser pain in the but when installing heatsinks, my giant hands had a painfully awkward time getting to the push pins. I eventually got the heatsink off, and immediately noticed that the paste that was on there wasn't spreading across the whole CPU. So I removed the paste, thinking how much smoother this was going now that it was off. Little did I know that putting the thing back on was going to be a circus.

I had to eventually take the tower's exhaust fan off, and take my RAM out, just so I could BARELY get my hands to the pins well enough to get a good grasp of them. After failing to even get the spreaders through the holes, dad had had enough and decided we should actually figure the mechanism out first. Eventually dad figured that you had to twist it all the way in one direction to unlock and pull the pin back to stop the spreader from being activated. Then you had to turn it half way back to push the pin down to secure it to the board, and then make one more half twist to lock it in place.

Figuring it out was the easy part.

Doing all of that basically blind was a complete circus. I don't know what OCZ was on when they decided that you could successfully push two pins on the diagonals at the same time, and that it was the best way to do it. Maybe you can, and we're just stupid, but we basically just had to go on intuition and a bit of luck. Eventually, it was in place. I know it's a good spread as we had to unmount the heatsink half way through due to one pin locking before being through the Mobo's hole. This was the only realy disturbance the new paste went through, so hopefully it didn't mess things up too bad.

So far things look pretty good. Where as I was idling around 44-45C while firefox was running and watching a video, and around 43C on the desktop idling, it's now around 40-41 in the browser and 39-40 on the desktop. This is all with my finally proven stable 3.6 ghz overclock, so I imagine I might have even lower temps if I was running stock.

This was definitely an interesting venture, and although it was incredibly intense and frustrating at times, I'm glad I did it for the experience. However, having said that I don't want to ever have to do it again for a VERY long time. My thumbs won't be able to handl it.

Have a good one,

CP1