Forza!

 A full two months since I last posted?  Really?  Well, let's do something about that.

Forza Horizon 5 just came out, and I'm having a blast.

Historically, I haven't much cared for racing games, just because of their limited scope.  Which is to say, it's hard to get into racing the same small bunch of cars on the same small batch of tracks and not get bored of it all, if you're not a hard-core racing fan.  The Forza Horizon series fixes that by giving you access to a huge selection of cars, from the all-but-useless to the seriously overpowered, an open world with a wide variety of races and challenges to pursue, some light guidance if you want to follow it, and things like seasonal variations (season changes once a week), so that even the exact same spot is likely to be different from one visit to the next.

This time around, the playground is Mexico, or rather a cobbled-together map of greatest hits of Mexican terrain and environments.  Desert, beach, jungle, volcano, city, town, ruins, agave farms, that sort of thing.  It's a very nice Mexican-themed park to play around in... well, as other reviewers have pointed out, it's fairly saturated with British-sounding sorts, so it's no cultural touchstone, but neither is it populated with egregious stereotypes, It's a nice place to drive through, but I wouldn't go relying on what you see here as being the real Mexico.

As for the driving itself, each car has its own feel, and can be modified to a fair degree, so those who want to spend time fine-tuning their performance (or, for that matter, spend hours modifying the look of their cars) can certainly do so.  Me, I take advantage of the auto-upgrade features built in, because I'm more of an "arcade" racer, enough so that I sometimes resort to taking advantage of the indestructibility of the cars to win a race by "driving by Braille", taking advantage of barriers to make turns at higher speed than anybody in the real world would even attempt.

Of course, the game has its weaknesses as well, but they tend to be small things that can either be overlooked or compensated for.  For example, there's a car radio feature that lets you select different stations to listen to, segregated by type of music.  In my case, I tend to leave it on Radio Eterna, which is classical music... and I understand, licensing costs for music is a thing, but classical should be on the low end of that spectrum, and the small number of tracks on that station is not a good thing.  It's not at the point yet where I need to turn off the in-game radio and pipe in music from some other source, but it's close.

All in all, it's a nice game that will likely keep me occupied for months, and it's part of Game Pass, so the price works for me as well.  If you're part of that ecosystem already, you should really give it a go.

What's that?  My other games?  Well, Destiny 2 is in a lull at the moment, so I may poke my head in on occasion, but I'm pretty sure it's on hiatus until the next major update comes next year.  Psychonauts 2, I really want to play more, but playing these collectathon games isn't leaving me enough time.  One of these days, I'll get back to that, I hope.