Skip to main content

Weeknotes 26-21: Forza Horizon 6

Yayyyyy day off today!! Rainy memorial day weekend isn’t ideal but I’m also pretty okay with a weekend where I kinda do nothing. Or more accurately, play a lot of Forza Horizon 6 and work on the website I was commissioned to make.

Tuesday/Wednesday this week was a pretty intense heatwave, hitting 95f both days which was kinda brutal. I pulled out all of my summer clothing, which is always an interesting time of reflection for what clothing I actually wear and want to wear each season. It’s tough in my office because even when it’s 95 out it’ll be like, 71 inside which means I need to change into pants when I get to work. Sorry for being crazy but I don’t think you should have to straight up change clothing when going inside from outside (with the exception of a jacket in the winter). Though wearing shorts when playing ping pong is so much nicer, kind of an upside almost of it being hot. It went from 90s immediately down to 60s and rainy which is funny, classic new england weather, but I’m sure it’ll be hot again soon enough.

This week Forza Horizon 6 came out, an extremely rare case of me buying a full-priced video game!!! I loved 4 and 5 so I was very excited going into this one, and not just because it’s set in Japan this time! As expected, it’s kinda more of the same as the last few, which I’m pretty okay with. I find all of the dialogue and writing to be incredibly cringe and the framing of the whole thing feels a little odd 6 entries in, like I always felt this way about the Assassin’s Creed games, why not just set them in the time period in a shared universe without the modern day VR time travel framing device??? I don’t know how much the Horizon series even needs their namesake festival anymore, like are we gaining anything by the game being structured around traveling to this country for a big music and car festival and being explictly a tourist? Just feels like a cop-out for writing a really lazy, surface-level version of each country. Like they keep doing this thing where the characters will tell you some one-line fact about the car you’re driving or the area you’re in that sounds interesting, but they never actually expand on it past “hey isn’t it cool that this car is influential?” or “this temple is really old and important in japanese culture!” which like, sure, but I’m not sure how much I’m really gaining by them saying any of this.

But!!!!! Whatever!!! It’s super fun so I can’t complain too much. I’ve been intentionally keeping all of the cars I get in the class they start in, which means I have a ton of C/B/A-class cars and almost nothing above that, which I think is the more fun way to play anyway. I’ll let it naturally progress up to S1 and above when the game wants me to 🙂‍↕️ I will most certainly be posting a screenshot collection when I’ve played more!

Things I’ve been into this week!!!