Forza 2

I've been playing Forza Motorsport 2 for the last week or two. Unlike other racing games like PGR3 which are largely arcade-style racing, Forza is really more of a racing simulation. The idea is that it keeps track of lots of various aspects of physics and tries to model tire friction, weight balance, etc. Overall, it does a pretty good job. Running around in a Lotus Exige, if you lift the throttle slightly mid-turn, you feel the car start to oversteer, which is what you'd expect in real-world cars of this caliber. It also has various things like ABS brakes, traction control and stability management to keep the car planted; but you can turn these off and the difference is quite accurate to real life. This is much different than the arcade racers where you keep the gas pedal floored and bounce off the walls or other cars.

So if you're into racing sims, FM2 for the XBox 360 is a good one. But what prompted me to write today isn't my addiction to this type of game where I must win every event as quickly as possible before I go insane.

It's some of the artwork I've seen posted online of how people are painting their cars. At first, I thought, "pretty cool" and wondered of various themes I could possibly create (limited though they may be being my artistically-limited self). But then I read a tutorial, and my thoughts changed lines. First off, because the tutorial will easily draw out a TLDNR for those not interested, the primary point is that you cannot upload pictures to the game. That means all of this artwork you see of fancy cars was done by hand.

Now, there are some very talented people out there doing this stuff. And I certainly respect their talent. However, I'm just not on their page. Given my limited XBox time, I would rather play the game rather than draw pictures using primitive shapes and basic effects. Having said that, my kids will spend an hour or more in front of Microsoft Paint making random things, but I for one cannot. Sure, I'll pick an appropriate color for a car I've purchased -- dark blue for the Audi RS 6, please. And yellow for the Lotus of course. But beyond that, I'm just not going to spend the time.

I'll admit that if they let you upload graphics from the network or a thumb drive that I would be slightly more tempted to create something original (well, kind of, because I wouldn't have drawn the original source). But I refuse to use my gaming time to draw rather than race!