An In-Depth Look at Forza Horizons @ E3 2012

Back in the late 1990's a small turf war erupted that eventually lead to the establishment of a traditional pecking order that would go on to dominate the car racing and car driving video game genres thereafter, with the decided winners of the series of long-running battles not so much a surprise to the gamers who are heavily invested in those genres, though the shake-out was something of a surprise for the casual gamer crowd.

The basic structure of the two sub-genres of the overall Auto Racing Genres came down to some predictable results -- and some surprises. With respect to the overall serious racing simulation set, the field was split between the two iconic game series that have constantly battled each other (and failed to resolve their conflict largely due to the fact that they coexist on two unique and separate platforms, destined to never literally face each other head-to-head), those being Turn 10's Forza Motorsports, and Sony's Gran Turismo.

---

The entrance to E3 2012, the place where gamers were exposed to the next big thing in Forza...

---

Forza and GT represent the cutting edge of racing simulation on console, providing gamers who tend to be fiercely loyal to one of the other just as they are fiercely loyal to their platform of choice -- with the two topics loyalties into each other. Regardless of which series you may find you follow, they both offer heart-pounding and uber-realistic racing action, encouraging gamers to establish not simply their story-mode campaign career with each new title in the series, but to take their mad racing skills online to do battle with the rest of the world, and scratch out their position in the heap of gamers -- or is it drivers? -- who call the genre their preferred home.

Outside of the hard core racing sim genre there exists a plethora of other sub-genres in the auto racing arena, each being dominated by iconic game series, examples of which includes Need for Speed, Burnout, Mod Nation, DiRT, Formula 1, Project Gotham, Colin McRae, NASCAR, Driver, and Midnight Club, while solo titles that have made serious inroads into the sport include Blur, Split/Second, Grid, Motorstorm, in fact so many that they are too numerous to mention individually.

The thing about all of those games -- whether they were solo titles or part of the established game series -- is that they each offered gamers a take on racing that was specific to their sub-genres and they never colour outside of the lines in that respect... That is until now.