#10: Forza Motorsport 7 (Xbox One/PC)

My least favorite part of having a job is having to drive to work. It's stressful. Driving kills tons of people every day. You have to follow all these rules and regulations, driving for long distances gives me shin splints. I drive an old shitty car that breaks down constantly. I've normalized the alarming, creaky noises it makes when i back out of my driveway every morning because my car still gets me to places and the sound goes away after a little while. I don't trust other people on the road, they might be drunk, tired, overworked, or just plain careless. I put my life in the hands of complete and total strangers every single day when I get behind the wheel.

It's also really hard to eat Taco Bell while driving which is unbelievably tragic.

I also guess driving and burning fossil fuels and stuff contributes to pollution and climate change which will kill us all probably some time in the next hundred years.

When I was growing up, Super Mario Kart appealed to me because I lived and breathed anything that was Nintendo and/or Mario-branded, even if at times these experiences weren't the best. The Nintendo cereal tasted like a toxic mixture of sawdust, capitalism, and fructose, i choked it down to appease my italian stereotype master. Mario Party literally burned holes in the palms of millions of children across America(https://www.cnet.com/…/nintendo-offers-glove-to-prevent-jo…/). I remember my friend showing me his still-bleeding palm wound like a badge of honor. The Pokemon anime's first major coverage it received in this country was about how it gave several Japanese children seizures(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoQRKCEHgY). I preordered the game and was often late to the bus stop so I could catch
every single episode. Gotta catch 'em all, as one would say.

Super Mario Kart however, was an astoundingly great game. Think driving is boring and repetitive? Hell yeah it is, so let's put weapons in it so you can blast people off the road like you had always dreamed of. Driving around in soulless metal boxes lacks personality? No worries, you can play as an adorable koopa troopa or established sex symbols like the phallus-shaped Toad, the devilishly handsome Luigi, or Yoshi, who has a wet and sticky tongue that stretches from here to Timbuktu. Don't have the patience or dexterity to learn how to race effectively? Braking and drifting was for the big kids and show-offs, and the randomness of items in the game meant that everyone in the family could play. I still fondly remember driving around the Chicagoland area looking for a copy of Mario Kart 64 with my dad, which is the last video game he played before they began to become too visually and mechanically complicated.

Mario Kart was my doorway into the world of racing games, but that door could never swing open completely. Frequent trips to the arcade as a child taught me that racing games were for the big kids. Cruisin USA, Daytona USA, and other such arcade racers with "USA" in the title were prohibitively expensive and seemed impossible because years of playing Mario Kart had taught me that braking in racing games was for sissies, despite it being an absolute necessity for success. It also made no sense to me at all to plunk 4 tokens into daytona to play it for 30 seconds and be humiliated by the unforgiving AI, which had no time for me and my childish antics but was more than happy to suck up an entire week's allowance in just a few minutes. It just made more sense to play Mario kart at home. Besides, those games were about "adult" stuff like cars, steering wheels, brake pedals, bikini-clad girls, and driving around in the real world. I was a kid who grew up on exploring the abstract fantasy worlds in nintendo games like the mushroom kingdom or wherever the hell Earthworm Jim was supposed to take place. I didn't want to drive around boring-ass San Francisco or whatever.

Now that I'm older though and a much more patient person. I wanted to stop making excuses about not trying out certain genres of games. I had long-written off racing games because i told myself the scantily-clad flag-waving girls
was a byproduct of car culture's off-putting hyper-masculinity and rootsy southern patriotism. Macho car commercials for SUVs and off-roading vehicles annoyed me. Mud flaps with silhouettes of girls on trucks have been and always will be gross. My childhood hero Calvin peeing on recognizable car manufacturing logos instead of dreaming big and going on adventures I found mean-spirited, judgmental, and going against everything that comic strip stood for. Basically, I thought the culture around cars sorta sucked and seemed anti-intellectual.

I began to realize however that my distaste for the toxic culture around cars, my hatred of commuting to work and following boring rules, and my lack of patience with figuring out how to get better at racing games was not the fault of the sport of racing itself. When I was younger I used to drive down the back roads towards Waubonsee Community College tearing down them at speeds hovering around 80 mph, it felt exhilarating. Television shows like Top Gear began to let me see that there was more depth to this sport that I assumed for so many years was just for macho types. I started meeting people who were into cars and I admired them due to their passion for a hobby I had never understood, and it turned out that they weren't macho or dumb like my younger self would have immediately assumed! This all led me to picking up Forza Horizon 3 last year at the suggestion of my good friend Lance Garrison. This was the perfect game for me to really start to understand just what made racing games so fun. The thrill of the speed, the freedom of not having to follow traffic laws, the ability to cruise around an open environment without any of the anxiety i have when it comes to driving around in real life. No need to worry about oil changes, gasoline, or needing brand brand new brake lines or any of that garbage. It's just you, the car, and an open road. Plus, driving around with pals was a lovely added bonus!

But the greatest thing to me about the Forza series of games is it's accessibility and how intuitive it is to be able to get started. The game hosts several ways to customize the racing AI, and by default has a GPS system to guide you on where you are supposed to go, going so far as even displaying a transparent line over the road to direct you exactly how to take turns by changing the color of the line depending on your speed. This helps you determine exactly how fast
your car should be going to take the turn optimally. All the guess work and trial-and-error challenges of learning just how the game wants you to drive is stripped away completely. It's sort of like having an omniscient computer co-pilot that teaches you how to play as you go. Instead of the computer AI being a soul-crushing wallet killer like the car-racing games i grew up with in the arcade, this computer is your greatest ally. Combine that with the gentle racing AI
that makes you feel great even when you're still learning the game makes it an absolutely perfect series for people who want to understand why people love cars and racing. The game even suggests to you automatically to try a suggested difficulty based on your performance as you race and will automatically set it to that difficulty as long as you give it permission to. It takes all of the decision-making out of your hands and into the games, all you need to focus on is having a great time. The alienating aspects of car culture is kept to a minimum too. There are no bikini girls here, you can even play as a lady if you like! There is a robust tuning system that you can lose hours in or just completely ignore.
Forza 7 also includes recreations of apparently famous car races that i have no idea about. Normally something like this I would have found masturbatory and dull, but the more I played the more I became genuinely interested in the cars and the
people behind them.

Instead of racing unrecognizable formula 1 cars or racing cars with a bunch of Arby's and Taco Bell ads plastered all over them, the car choices include such popular commuter mainstays as the honda civic, which lets non-car fanatics choose vehicles that you might actually be familiar with. It also lets you tune these cars up in gleefully stupid ways. One of my favorite parts of the game is it's insanely robust fan community that makes custom paint jobs and decals for the car of your choice. I am playing the entirety of Forza 7 with SSJ Goku emblazoned on the side of my Ford Fiesta, and it is just as incredible as it sounds.

Forza Motorsport 7, lacks the open world that Horizon 3 had, but even here there is a wide variety of circuits to choose from. These tracks rotate in and out of the career mode with a variety that takes a solid amount of time until they start to get
a little tiresome. It's a game best-played in short bursts. I try to clear a cup or two every few days, but it's not a game I'd recommend marathonning through. 30 hours of gameplay over the last month and I have only played through about a third of what the game has to offer single player-wise, so you definitely don't feel short-changed on content.

the Forza series are the games that made me not hate cars, both in video games and in real life. if you have even a passing interest in cars or going really fast I whole-heartedly recommend picking one of these games up.
They opened my mind up to a sport many feel passionate about despite my previous reservations. They are great examples of how important it is to make your work and your culture more inclusive. It turns out that like with many things, all you have to do is sprinkle a little bit of DBZ into something and I'm on board.