Firing up the Forza Motorsport 3 demo for the first time is an unnerving affair. I never played Forza 1 or 2, preferring to get my racing game kicks by drifting around Super Mario Kart. I have only recently assuaged my driving sim desires by picking up an old copy of PGR 4, so I am either in the perfect position to judge whether this demo is any good, or so thoroughly sick of braking for corners that I will be pawing for my SNES controller before I’ve even finished a race.

It’s unnerving because the intro is essentially a giant advertisement for Audi and their rather Minority Report looking RS8 V10. Audi have certainly been getting their product placement kicks at our expense, and I’m just thinking of their turn in Ironman as a recent example. As it happens, I had been thinking of getting an Audi as my next car for a while now (just putting it off), perhaps an A3 or A4, but I overheard a self-righteous clothing store clerk in a trendy baseball cap say “Audi, they’re the new car that’s only driven by complete cocks” which clearly means that BMW M3 owners can breathe easy. Well, as easy as you can through all that aftershave.

The intro that loops after the splash screen finishes with the new concept Dodge Challenger literally bucking off the line. Can rear wheel drive cars create so much torque from standstill that the front two wheels will actually lift off the asphalt? I’m gonna have to check youtube for this one, because I call bullshit. Yeah, bullshit.

Hitting start drops you straight into the Car Select menu. It’s nice an clean and it has a few cars which are mostly red. There’s a Mini, an Evo, a Ferrari, the R8, and a 911 which looks like someone vomited decal all over it after a boozy night out.

I went for the R8, and the screen drops away to give me a full Audi Logo which dissolves into a slow pan across the CAD lines of the car itself. It’s nicely rendered, but it doesn’t look real. If you squint slightly, it might even be cell shaded. I can only assume it’s accurately portrayed and the inside of the car looks like it might be real, but there’s definitely some uncanny valley stuff going on here. Also, this car lust session is an infinite loop, so you’re stuck with the calming relaxation music and the floating red car until you hit a button. But you’ve already done this, cos you wanna drive cars fast. And rightly so.

A menu of options, for difficulty and all the bits on the car that come as standard in real life so you don’t die (ABS, traction control etc) and that you’d only turn off if you were on the Top Gear test track and you were filming a section for Top Gear and your name was Richard Hammond, or Jeremy Clarkson. James May would keep all that stuff switched on, and choose Easy, which is what I’m going to do. Easy mode got me through PGR 4 and it’ll get me through this demo.

There’s only one course to try and it’s the Camino Viejo de Montserrat. Now obviously the mountains of Montserrat are far too bloody dangerous to be sliding a fast car about on, but this is why man invented video games, so that his every greatest wish and desire could be pixellated and made very very safe.

There’s a Rewind button? Ala Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? This should make for some interesting game sanctioned cheating, on account of my inability to miss the jutty out sections of the railing which turn my car into a flat spin.

Alright, so I whipped through my 2 laps without too much trouble. The car feels nice and heavy and responds well to input. I clipped a few cars and walls and the damage model shows my R8 to be less than pristine. This is already a marked improvement to PGR 4, where I could drive at 200mph into a wall and the worst that would happen is the windscreen might crack.

Having never played Forza 1 or 2, I don’t know if this guide line is new or not (I’ll assume it’s not), but it’s new to me. A series of green arrows guide you through the best line for each corner. When you’re going too fast, the arrows go through the traffic light colours and return to green when you’ve got the right speed to hold the line. This is a capital lettered Nice Touch. However, it does take a great deal of the skill out of it, what little skill is left having chosen the Easy difficulty, and reduced all the complex nuances of driving to accelerate, brake, turn left, turn right. Which is what driving boils down to I suppose, so er, bravo?

The Rewind function doesn’t work quite as I expected. I thought it would be like rewinding live TV, so that you’d hold the back button until it spooled to the part you wanted to pick it up from, but instead it rewinds a certain distance and then asks if you’d like to pick it up from that point or go back further. When it drops you back in, it doesn’t seem to do so cleanly, almost as if the position of the car gets corrected a degree or two. It’s a bit disconcerting, but I like that idea that you don’t have to redo a whole race just because you borked a corner, or clipped the wrong car. I tried to drift one corner, and the heavyset R8 did not like that. I’m sure like all driving games, it’s a knack that’ll come with a little practice.

The screen stills in the loading screens look nice, but everything in game seems a bit sparse in detail. I kind of expected the driving sim genre to be near photo realistic by now, at the very least the cars, but I guess they have just a little way to go yet.

I think if I give myself a little space between Forza 3 and PGR 4, I might actually enjoy this game. First impressions are good, but the thought of sinking another 30+ hours into a driving sim fills me with a certain degree of travel nausea.