Grinding Forza 3

You know what? I’m playing a game right now. As we speak. It’s Forza 3. The game doesn’t require a player. Let me explain.

It actually fits well to some of the stuff I’ve written recently about NFS:Shift. I started playing Forza 3 some time ago. Actually I’ve been holding out for the new Gran Turismo but then it occurred to me that it was a good idea to get the Xbox 360 Elite and hey, it came with Forza 3. I started playing it for recreation. After a stressful day of work, there is nothing more soothing to me than to get in a fast car, turn off my brain and engage in some repetitive racing. I even listened to some podcasts while doing so. Works great.

But now the game overstays it’s welcome. And then some. Playing trough 6 seasons of races took quite some time already. But one achievement actually expects you to finish ALL the racing events in the game. No biggie, I thought. The list of all racing events fits on just one screen.

Each of the tiny boxes is a separate Event that consists of multiple races.

But that one screen is deceiving. It contains 220 events, each consisting of multiple races. There are 969 races in the game in total, each takes at least a couple of minutes. So yeah, it takes A LONG TIME.

Enter the “Hire Driver” function. You can actually make the computer AI do a race for you. This actually isn’t new. Gran Turismo 4 had something similar. And that’s how I’m bascially grinding through the game right now. I enjoyed the game while I was playing it. But now as I see the AI tackling one identical race after another, the respect I had towards the game fades away. The fact that you still need to stick around to click “ok” after each race and set up the next one makes the experience pretty close to Watch Paint Dry. Only not funny.

On a positive note, I can satisfy my need to clear up my backlog and concentrate on other things at the same time. Like writing a post. Ah, there you go! Another race finished.