I was literally in Japan last summer and nothing about Forza Horizon 6 reminds me of Japan. The fact it's full of twatty American influencers doesn't help. The main NPC in this has the same name as my wife and the fact it keeps barking my name makes it like Nagging Simulator 2026.
The only advantage it has is it's not like the previous game where I kept seeing my mate driving around for months after he'd died of testicular cancer.
The main problem as always is that Microsoft the parent company knows nothing about what the Xbox division does and just wants to know how much money it makes.
They see Halo, Gears and Forza making money and assume the solution is to make more Halo, Gears and Forza. All the other things that build a platform people actually want to own are just unprofitable distractions to the people at the top.
I really thought the new Xbox CEO was making the right noises recently but it feels she’s just been steamrolled by the money men here.
There was some good stuff in there. I'm looking forward to the Xenoblade upgrades as I picked up 2 in a sale ages ago and have been waiting for a Switch 2 patch to actually play it (only played 1 previously). New Pokopia content is exciting (and looks quite sizeable). New Fire Emblem is shaping up well.
The little we saw of Ocarina had strong "shitty fan project made in Unreal Engine" vibes about it but I guess we'll see when more is revealed. The challenge is not going to be making it look pretty, but creating a version of the game that doesn't feel absurdly small and boxy by modern day standards. I played a bit of the N64 version earlier this year and it's still an astonishing achievement for 1998 but it really isn't like a modern game in any way, shape or form.
I'm still baffled that they haven't done anything at all with Mario Kart World since release, though. It's crying out for new tracks, modes, anything really.
The amount of remakes going on at the moment is ridiculous (I mean who really needed a worse-looking version of Rayman) but I'll be keeping an eye on the Code Veronica remake, it was always one of my favourites of the series and maybe the one that's aged the worst so a proper ground-up remake is well overdue.
I originally did the final dungeon as an 8-man back near release. Every other player skipped all the cutscenes and went charging off, leaving me to trudge slowly through an empty dungeon to the end after they’d killed everything. It was shit. I’m very glad they changed it.
Garwoofoo