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Category: Our Digital Future™

For things that are no longer readily available unless one sails the seven seas.

  • Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious – It’s about family.

    Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious – It’s about family.

    The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of many movie franchises I just haven’t really watched. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the various Star Wars and Star Trek spinoffs among many, many other series, I just can’t really see myself sitting down and watching these by myself. I know this is partially a fault of me treating watching things as a social experience, but some day I will watch those popcorn action flicks with Cool Cars and equally Cooler Stunts.

    Naturally with a franchise that’s been around as long as it has – over two decades! – there’s been video games. Official licensed ones such as the unremarkable Fast & Furious Showdown, Cruis’n for Wii, which was a port of the Fast & Furious arcade game but without the licensing, even the TV show spinoff Fast & Furious: Spy Racers got a tie-in game: Rise of SH1FT3R. But I wanna focus on one that was a tie-in to an existing popular franchise that also involved cars and wild stunts.

    Is this the car version of that Distracted Boyfriend meme?

    Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious was a tie-in game released on Xbox One and Xbox 360 as a tie-in to Furious 7, which is when the franchise started using weird names to refer to its sequels. Developed by regular Forza devs Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios, alongside Sumo Digital for the 360 port, this was a free* tie-in that was a standalone expansion to Forza Horizon 2. I put an asterisk there because it was free for the first month or so of release, eventually requiring one to pay for it for the last few months it was available. More on that later.

    You play as a nameless protagonist who gets a call from Tej Parker, a recurring character in the previous films, with Chris “Ludacris” Bridges reprising his role. Through a semi-fictionalized version of Nice, France, the player must drive through the streets and complete races to gain enough street cred.

    If you think you need to understand the Fast & Furious films to play this, you don’t. The game starts with a clip montage of some of the wildest moments from past films, and you can get a handful of cars from the film, like Dom Toretto’s 1970 Dodge Charger. Otherwise, this is easily understandable even to a person like me who only has a bit of knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise.

    For this article, I played the Xbox 360 version, as that’s the most recent console I own at the time of this writing. Yes, even in 2024, I still haven’t jumped to the 8th generation of game consoles. Which, y’know, when you got a powerful PC, it seems kinda pointless to grab a modern console unless you wanna play a game exclusive to that platform. Surely there’s no major differences between the two games besides graphical fidelity, right?

    The driving line: Something that folks like me should follow, but rarely do.

    Anyone who’s played the previous Forza Horizon games will be right at home here: Racing with driving lines, a rewind feature for mistakes, and a big amount of difficulty customization from racing game newbies to veteran Forza players. When not racing, you can accrue points for stylish driving, go through speedtraps to break your friends’ records if any, and even get “barn finds” for hidden cars that can help build the old collection.

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  • Weekend Writing: About Sega’s 60th, Free Games and Game Preservation.

    Weekend Writing: About Sega’s 60th, Free Games and Game Preservation.

    Rarely do I ever write about things as they’re happening. Often times I’m behind the curve and write about things after the fact. But this particular post felt so time-sensitive that I needed to push back another post that was gonna be hitting this week to write about this. I’m gonna talk about freebie games and the importance of game preservation.

    Sega is doing a special event to celebrate their 60th anniversary as a company. Called “GO SEGA,” it’s a Steam sale that discounts many of the publisher’s games. From their PC breakouts like the Total War, Company of Heroes and Football Manager franchises, to established classics like Sonic the Hedgehog and Yakuza. Hell, you can even get NiGHTS into Dreams… for free. (I heard this version is not as good as the Saturn original, but Good Enough for most people.)

    This may look like a dinky mobile game, but I appreciate anyone remaking Combat even in 2020.

    In addition to this sale, they’re releasing some free games. A top-down tank battle game based on Company of Heroes called Armor of Heroes. A mashup of Fantasy Zone and Endless Space called Endless Zone. A mashup of Streets of Rage 2 and Yakuza called Streets of Kamurocho. And finally, a polished prototype for a Golden Axe reboot called Golden Axed that ended up getting a bit of notoriety since some of the developers on that project, Tim Dawson and Sanatana Mishra, were surprised their unfinished hard work was being given away for free. (You can read both Dawson’s and Mishra’s Twitter threads about their involvement in the game. It highlights how even on unfinished work like this, that crunch culture is prevalent.)

    Fun fact: I’ve never played Fantasy Zone. If this crossover is any indication, I’d have a real hard time enjoying it.

    Those all sound neat, right? Free games inspired by Sega’s established franchises are always a neat little thing. Well, here’s the catch: They’re all only available for a few days, with them releasing a new game each day. (As of this writing, Streets of Kamurocho has just been released.) After October 19th, they’re gone for good, making them unable to be downloaded once the sale’s over.

    So you’re probably asking: why are you so concerned? It’s free stuff for a promotional sale, it’s stuff that isn’t gonna blow people’s minds or anything. “You should be grateful they’re even giving out free stuff!” you might say. That’s a terrible line of thinking, and let me explain why.

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