I always preferred Forza Horizon to the traditional Forza, but I never thought that was a compliment to me. I would love to say that I stopped going to church because I had unspun the fundamental philosophies inherent to it, and stood astride it, gleaming like a newly minted God. It's a fiction I'd love to maintain. In the end, I simply couldn't hack it - I was willing to engage in a multi-year campaign of gruesome self-recrimination, obviously. But once it became clear that it was utterly open-ended, a blank check I would perpetually cash against my own identity, I could burn myself alive or try to go on as a maimed and useless creature. That's basically me and Forza Horizon. I wish that I were hardcore enough for the progenitor - of the universe, or the racing franchise. Take your pick.
Of course, my obsession with the idea that games have lineage - as mortals do - won't let me go on without suggesting that the developer of Forza Horizon, Playground Games, shares DNA with Project Gotham. Well, it goes back to a lot of shit. Bizarre Creations is one of my favorite developers of all time. Keep in mind that Geometry Wars - one of the greatest games of all time - was a fucking minigame in Project Gotham Racing 2. As if defining racing and retro for a new generation weren't sufficient, they also made The Club and Blur. At a certain point we might have to recognize that my affection for what they've done isn't entirely dependent on religious trauma.
As somebody who plays games on PC, I tried to turn on and use a couple consoles recently - an Xbox One X and a PS4 Pro - and was startled to learn that they were no longer consoles but elaborate, expensive shapes on my media shelf. They no worky. And they haven't had to worky, because cross-platform play is so normalized that if Gorb and I want to play a game we typically can. But, yeah. Forza Horizon as a console experience and Forza Horizon as a PC experience aren't the same thing. I'm here to tell you right now: the things I consider the ante for playing a videogame are insuperable barriers for people who did not grow up with autoexec.bat - let alone config.sys! It would be like having to solve a puzzle room to access your fridge. Which sounds awesome to me. But maybe not everybody!
Console is incoherent in this framing. I think there are a lot of people who want an appliance - a device that produces gaming as its primary function. When he grabbed Crimson Desert, and it had some significant issue with a specific refresh rate on his PS5 Pro, he's like... I'm good. He's not out here tryna fuck menus and shit. Like Indiana Jones, I am always ready to engage in multidisciplinary tasks in order to get what I came for. As a true believer, I'd love to scourge a heathen. But there's a point at which these products feel like legally actionable false advertising. You know?
This is something that makes me very curious about the Steam Machine. These revels have been put on pause as a result of the way our masters have decided the world should work, obviously. It's super dumb. But I don't think that the route between somebody who wants a console and somebody who wants a PC is as straight as the broadest spectrum of commentators think. My best friend loves gaming more than anyone I've ever met, but has a hard time imagining crowdsourcing the basic aspects of his leisure time. I don't think it's just him.
(CW)TB out.
