Forza Motorsport

Forza Motorsport is a simulation Racing game series for the Xbox and Xbox360 by Microsoft and their internal Turn 10 Studios division, aimed at competing with Sony's Gran Turismo franchise, and is noted for an extensive car painting system, performance customization and a massive car list.

The first game was released in Spring 2005 for the original Xbox, and Forza Motorsport 2 and Forza Motorsport 3 followed in 2007 and 2009, respectively, for the Xbox 360. Each successive game added little things on top: Forza Motorsport 2 added a storefront and auction site where people can buy and sell tuning setups, cars and car designs, while Forza Motorsport 3 added an in-car camera, rollover damage and a rewind mechanic to give players the option of redoing corners without starting from scratch. Forza Motorsport 4 adds Kinect functionality, additional gamemodes (autocross, track days, etc), 16-player multi-player, Top Gear branding and features, and an "Autovista" feature where you can look at high-res models of featured cars while Jeremy Clarkson talks about it.

Tropes used in Forza Motorsport include:
  • The Alleged Car: Forza Motorsport 4 features famous Alleged Cars like the Ford Pinto, Chevrolet Corvair and the Mustang King Cobra. However, despite being painfully slow, they all work just as well as any other car.
  • An Entrepreneur Is You: You can earn plenty of credits solely by selling liveries (Forza Motorsport 2 onwards) and car setups (Forza Motorsport 3/Forza Motorsport 4) you have created. There's also the Auction House.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: The rewind feature in Forza Motorsport 3. Forza Motorsport 4 has it too, but it can be turned off for bonus credits.
  • Artificial Brilliance: The A.I. in Forza Motorsport 4 will adjust their behavior based on how you drive. What this means is that if you drive like it's a demolition derby, they will smash into you just as often as you try to smash into them. Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4 have the "Pressure" system: if you ride on the ass of an A.I. player, the A.I. will be pressured into braking later and later in order to try to pull ahead of you. Keep on them long enough, and they will usually eventually miss the braking point entirely and go flying off the track.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • In Forza Motorsport 3, A.I. drivers will occasionally spontaneously swerve all over the road and mash into each other, and it's easy for them to get stuck on each other. They also did not have upgraded cars, turning single player "races" into glorified hotlapping.
    • In Forza Motorsport 4, Track Day (hotlapping while AI cars simulate slower traffic) events in Rivals. The A.I. are painfully slow, reaching single digits in some corners, and they will regularly pull out into your path, sometimes for no reason at all. This turns the longer events into Those Two Levels.
  • Auction: The Auction House. Players put their cars up for sale on the auction house, and players bid on the cars.
  • Awesome but Impractical:
    • SUVs and pickup trucks. They can toss other cars around like toys, but they're so heavy and top heavy that they tend to plow through corners. Pickups are basically death traps online in Forza Motorsport 3, as they're very light in the back, rear wheel driven, and it's very easy for other players to accidentally or purposely hit it, and cause it to spin out, though the problem is less noticeable in Forza Motorsport 4 because of the better collision system.
    • The SSC Ultimate Aero is the second fastest car in the world, with 1200 horsepower and torque. The top speed is higher than the Veyron... but it's rear wheel drive, not all wheel drive. What this essentially means is that you get wheelspin well into fourth gear, making the car nearly un-drivable without traction control enabled.
    • Cowl hood scoops and air scoops in Forza Motorsport 4. They look badass, and reduce weight (being made from lighter materials than steel), but they severely restrict interior vision: the king of these being the cowl available on the 2002 Trans-Am, which blocks all of your vision in the cockpit view, as the cowl is pretty much right at eye level.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: Turbochargers, which provide the biggest speed boost for the least added weight of the aspiration conversions.
  • Boring but Practical: Weight removal and tire compound/grip upgrades, which are likely going to be the most commonly used upgrades.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory:
    • In-game example. The Hired Driver in Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4. For a mere 50% of your winnings (easily negated by disabling driver aids and increasing the A.I.'s difficulty), he'll almost guarantee a win in any race on any difficultly. The Hired Driver basically drives like The Stig.
    • Forza Motorsport 3 had the Game Breaker Porsche 550, which thoroughly dominated almost every leaderboard. It was part of one of the $5 DLC packages.
  • Car Fu:
    • There are gametypes where you get points for mashing the other cars. The Cat and Mouse gametype requires you to defend your team's Mouse (a slow car) and take out the enemy Mouse and their Cats (high performance cars), which usually means mashing into the enemy Mouse as fast as possible and trying to flip them over. There's also a more standard demolition derby gametype, where you get points for ramming players at high speed.
    • Online play can frequently turn into Car Fu, unfortunately. The Forza Motorsport 3's netcode means that a slight bump can cause a car to act like you did a full blown PIT maneuver, and can result in a pileup with every player mashing into each other; the first corner of a track is notorious for causing these pileups. The problem of slight taps sending cars spinning has been fixed in Forza Motorsport 4, but there are usually pileups at the first corner because people drive like idiots.
  • Character Tiers: A game mechanic, each car is given a numerical value called their Performance Index (PI), which is then matched to a letter grade; higher letters mean faster classes. Cars can be upgraded to higher classes, and a few can be creatively downgraded to lower classes too, with engine or aspiration swaps or by installing heavy rims. In general the classes can be thought of as:
    • F class - City cars, old economy cars, hybrids.
    • E class - Hot hatchbacks, '60-'70s sports cars.
    • D class - American muscle cars, '90-'00s sports cars.
    • C class - European and Japanese sports sedans, high performance hot hatches.
    • B class - Late '00s/high performance sports cars and sport sedans.
    • A class - 90s/early 00s super cars.
    • S class - Modern supercars, "track day" cars.
    • R3 class - Hypercars and road-car based racing cars.
    • R2 class - Purpose built racing cars which still resemble roadcars.
    • R1 and X class - Le Mans Prototype cars.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Most obvious in Forza Motorsport 4, where the cars each AI driver drives are the same color, when a car's color can be chosen. For instance, M. Rossi's cars are [almost] always red, as close to Rossa Corsa as possible.
  • Cool Car: Hundreds of them! And that's before you start loading them with performance upgrades and light body kits.
  • Creator Provincialism: Not to the same extent as Gran Turismo, but there are a lot of classic and modern muscle cars.
  • Crossover: Forza Motorsport 4 features the Top Gear (UK) test track, and Jeremy Clarkson will provide commentary on dozens of cars in the Autovista mode. All the Reasonably Priced Cars from the UK and US Top Gear will show up as well.
    • The Warthog from Halo will appear as an Easter Egg in the Autovista mode. Unfortunately, it's not drivable.
  • Did Not Do the Research: Some of the cars have small inaccuracies: one of the Skylines has the wrong brake light setup, and one of the Lexuses in Forza Motorsport 3 had the gas cap on the wrong side.
  • Downloadable Content: Mostly in the form of car packages and the occasional track. Forza Motorsport 4 has monthly car packs, which have an assortment of cars: so far, the packs usually contain at least 1 classic car, a few modern cars, a truck, a newer-model year of an existing car or a racing version of an existing car, and purpose built racing cars.
  • Drives Like Crazy: M. Rossi, the fastest AI driver in single-player. He will occasionally mash you off the starting line, and use the PIT maneuver on you if you get in his way on corners.
  • Driving Stick: Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4 allow the player to set the shifting behavior to "Manual + Clutch". On the Xbox controller, you'll have to hold down the LB button while shifting up or down. On expensive racing wheels (like the Fanatec CSR), this mode will make you use the clutch pedal and the 6 speed H-pattern shifter. Poor shifting will result in near-stalls, engine damage (shifting into first gear at 200mph, for example), or engine lugging. If you don't use the clutch when starting from a standstill (such as at the start or after a wreck), the engine will repeatedly nearly seize-up, resulting in a painfully slow start, especially in cars with huge turbochargers.
  • Dynamic Difficulty: Shows up in Forza Motorsport 4's World Tour. The AI starts ridiculous easy, but the more events you win, the harder they become.
  • Easier Than Easy: All the games (but Forza Motorsport 3 in particular) have plenty of ways to make things easier on yourself. You're encouraged to crank up the difficulty and turn off the driver aids though: the harder the difficulty is, the more money you earn.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: Averted despite having an actual Ford Pinto in the game.
  • Every Car Is Rear Wheel Drive: HEAVY DUTY Aversion: if the tail end is sliding on your SEAT, unless you're doing it on purpose, it's because you ruined the suspension. However, if the manufacturer also has rear wheel drive cars, you can typically perform RWD swaps on the cars - so you could make a RWD Honda Civic - or a FWD Honda NSX.
  • Expansion Pack: The Porsche expansion pack in Forza Motorsport 4, coming out in May. Re-introduces 23 of Forza Motorsport 3's Porsches, adds 7 new ones that weren't in previous games, adds achievements, and adds more single-player events.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: The games let you take pictures (adjusting focus, aperture, all that jazz) in-game and upload them to the Forza website to download.
  • Fragile Speedster: Small cars like the Lotus Elan and Mazda Miata offer extremely good handling, but they're tiny and slight nudges can cause them to spin out.
  • Game Breaking Bug: Forza Motorsport 4 had a bug in online player where players may hang up in loading screen... sometimes up to five minutes, until the game boots them out to the lobby or pukes up a "disc is dirty" error. When this happens, the entire lobby gets stuck in the loading screen until the person causing the delay get booted out by the game. This was patched in the March 23rd update.
  • Green Aesop: Forza Motorsport 4 has hybrids like the dreaded Toyota Prius, and electric cars like the Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Roadster. There's a player title reward for driving 1,000 miles in hybrid or electric cars.
  • Hard Mode Perks: Disabling driver assists (such as anti-lock brakes, traction control, racing/braking line) and increasing the A.I. difficulty nets you more cash... disabling every assist and enabling the hardest A.I. will give you an extra 165% cash on top of the regular winnings in Forza Motorsport 4.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence A few, but the most egregious being the low tire walls, which stop you as if they were made of cast iron.
  • Itasha: Can be done from Forza Motorsport 2 onwards.
  • Jack of All Stats: Sporty hot-hatchbacks like the Ford Focus ST offer a good blend of speed, acceleration, handling and braking.
  • Joke Character: Hybrids, which for the most part, are outran by everything else in the game when stock. You can, of course, turn them into insane drag racers because of Forza's huge customization though.
    • The May DLC for Forza Motorsport 4 has a Smart For Two, a Ford Transit van [1], and the AMC Pacer X.
  • Lethal Joke Character: The city cars are ridiculously fast when upgraded, and handle very well.
    • The car dominating the lower class leaderboards in Forza Motorsport 4? The hybrid Chevrolet Spark.
  • Loads And Loads Of Cars Forza Motorsport 4 has almost 500 cars on its own. The monthly DLC packs and the Porsche Expansion Pack increases the car count to over 600.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Track Day events, if you're trying to get a "clean" laps (no contact with other cars, stay on the track at all times, no rewind). The A.I. cars that drive around the track will brake and swerve with no warning.
  • Magikarp Power: The Datsun 510 and VW Rabbit in the third game absolutely dominate with enough modification, although any heavily modified car applies.
  • Mighty Glacier: The HUMMER H1 Alpha in Forza Motorsport 4. It's nigh-impossible to really damage, and weighs the better part of eight thousand pounds. The "Weight removal" upgrade on it effectively acts like removing an entire Ford Focus from the weight of the truck.
    • And even after applying full weight reduction, it's still heavier than the second-heaviest car in the game.
  • Multi-Track Drifting: There is nothing (besides common sense) stopping you from tuning the four ton HUMMER H1 Alpha to be used as a drift car.
  • Nintendo Hard: Any event with a field of R1 Le Mans Prototype cars and no assists. These cars have 6-700 horsepower, but only weigh 900kg at most, so the slightest twitch on the throttle is almost guaranteed to cause you to spin out and mash into a wall.
  • Old Save Bonus: Having a Forza Motorsport 3 game save will reward Forza Motorsport 4 players with additional credits, some unicorn cars (see Rare Vehicles below) and an achievement.
  • Pass Through the Rings: Autocross events in Forza Motorsport 4. Cones are set up to form gates along the track, and you pass between them as you go along the track. Hitting the cones results in a +5 second time penalty to your lap. The cones are set up to form slaloms and create extremely tight corners, making them excellent ways to test a car's handling and stability.
  • Rare Vehicles: The Forza Motorsport series has two types of rare car:
    • There are numerous examples of actual rare cars. For instance, you could be in a race with sixteen Ferrari F50 GTs... Ferrari only made three!
    • Forza Motorsport 2, Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4 also have "unicorn cars". These cars cannot be bought in-game, and are only available from official competitions or via auction (if you have the millions of credits needed).
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: One of the complaints a few reviewers had about early titles in the series was that some of the cars did not sound like they would in real-life. However, those cars sound exactly like they do in real-life. The audio engineers even went and sampled the individual components of those cars' engines on electric motors so they could fine tune individual engine noises as players modified their vehicles. However, this is not necessarily how those vehicles sound in Hollywood films.
  • Rice Burner:
    • Some people do up their cars like this.
    • Painting and selling cars was such a major part of the Forza Motorsport 2 community that it got turned into an entire section of the game in Forza Motorsport 3, complete with leaderboards.
  • The Rival: Gran Turismo.
  • RPG Elements:
    • Each race in career mode gives you experience as well as money. At certain levels, you are gifted what should be an appropriate car...
    • The third and fourth games also have manufacturer levels, which give cash and increasing discounts on aftermarket parts. In the fourth game, you can (eventually) get all manufacturer upgrades for free!
  • Scenery Porn: The Fujimi-Kaido track in Forza Motorsport 3: cliff faces, rivers, waterfalls, and none of this is in the skybox. You can actually look alongside the track and see some rapids with water flowing over them. They even put in a small scenic overlook so you could stop and gawk at it all.
    • Forza Motorsport 4. The Alps. Whoa.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Subsystem Damage: Forza Motorsport splits your cars into sections: bodywork, engine, gearbox, brakes, steering and suspension. Damage to each section reduces your car's performance accordingly.
    • For instance, a shunt in the rear will damage the rear bumper and can usually be shrugged off. However, changing down a gear without lowering the revs sufficiently will wreck the gearbox and severely limit your top speed and acceleration.
  • A Taste of Power:
    • Forza Motorsport 3 begins with a practice race in an Audi R8... and then makes you pick between a Honda Fit or a Ford Fiesta.
    • Forza Motorsport 4 starts with a practice race in a Ferrari 458 Italia, and makes you pick between a Toyota Agyo or a Chevrolet Spark.
  • Technology Porn: The Autovista mode in Forza Motorsport 4 is this.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: According to Jeremy Clarkson's Autovista for the Mercedes McLaren SLR the designers couldn't even agree what the car sounded like (the Germans say it's like a Messerschmitt, the Brits said it is like Spitfire).
    • This is pretty much taken exactly from the review he did of the car on Top Gear, but without the additional [paraphrased] line of: "Personally, I think it sounds like the God of Thunder... Gargling with nails!"
  • Teleport Spam: A non-intentional, hilarious side effect of players joining with terrible connections. Cars with poor connections will start phase-shifting across the track wildly, suddenly appearing in the sky, partially submerged in the ground, or inside someone's car.
  • Vanity License Plate: While none of the cars have license plates affixed, it's easy to create (or download) a decal to use as a license plate. You can then stick whatever you want on it.
  • Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Some liveries are based entirely around nation flags; for example, a racing livery for a Lotus based on the flag of the United Kingdom.
  • Wronski Feint: If an A.I. car is riding on your ass, and they only start to overtake you right before a turn, they'll go flying through the turn from breaking too late, often slamming into a wall. Happens frequently in multi-player when dealing with rammers: if you see someone aiming to smash into you, just go wide at a turn and smash on the brakes, and the rammer will go flying through the turn and smash into the walls of the track.
  1. ↑ It's the racing version, but it's still a delivery van.
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