My first experience with racing games came via the alien-looking three-pronged controller of a Nintendo 64. My dad and I would play Mario Kart 64, and I’d tease him when he?d slip on bananas and bump into the wall. Fast forward a good number of years, and I’ve just handed Dad the controller for Forza Motorsport 7. He’s still bumping walls, in this case because he braked too late, overwhelmed the front tires on a Porsche 911 GT2 RS, and crashed hard enough to void the new production-car king of the ?Ring of both its side mirrors?plus its rear wing. Welcome to racing games in 2017.
High-Horsepower Stunner
FM7 running on Xbox One and Xbox One S is without doubt the best-looking game we’ve ever laid eyes on. The intricacies, detail, and (eventual) imperfections of the on-screen vehicles capture the glamour and grit of motorsports as no title has done before. Flecks of tire rubber accumulated on the front splitter of our car throughout a night race at Daytona. After five laps of the new Dubai Circuit of the Emirates, a 1945 Jeep Willys MB we chose for the task ended up with a near photorealistic layer of desert sand on its windshield, including portions that stayed put just outside the arc of its wiper blade. Playing from the cockpit view of a Corvette C7.R during an hour-long endurance race at Spa, we ignored FM7?s updated?and excellent?on-screen overlays, instead choosing to rely on the C7.R?s dash-mounted shift lights and console-display...