I took a little time away from ODST yesterday to check out the Forza 3 and Brutal Legends demos that went up Xbox Live Marketplace.   I’m not really a fan of simulation racing games because I suck at them, but I decided to check out Forza 3 anyway because the trailers look amazing.  About 10 seconds in I realized that Forza 3 might be one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen.  Unfortunately I still sucked at it, but at least while I was looking everything was nice to look at.  I started with the slowest Class D car, the Mini Cooper, on Easy with all the assists turned on.  I still barely managed to come in second.  I just can’t control the cars well with my controller. I’m not sure why that is but I just never got the hang of it. I think I would do a lot better with the wheel controller, but I’m not going to spend the money on it to find out I as wrong about that.  If it were not for the auto-braking assist I would probably not have even finished the race.  At least with that assist on I can keep the trigger for gas down all the time and just worry about steering.  I also really like the Rewind Button that lets you back up when you mess up or crash.  Apparently they don’t want you to ever touch another car because any time I would rub another car a little it would show the hint that I could rewind.  I don’t plan to buy or rent Forza 3 because I don’t think it really qualifies as racing when all you do is steer with all the assists turned on.  I can definitely see the appeal after trying some of the faster cars, but racing games are just not my thing.  If you’re even remotely interested in Forza 3 give the demo a shot. It looks amazing and really promising for people who like to race.

After giving up on winning a race I switched over to the 2GB Brutal Legend demo.  I’m going to try not to spoil the demo because it was really funny.  The demo starts with a fairly long cut scene showing how you got to the main location for the game and gives some background on who you are.  If you are into Metal and Rock music it is really worth checking out the demo.  It is a little bit cheesy, but in a good way.  I had a lot of fun playing through the demo and while the controls seem pretty simple it ran smoothly most of the time.  The one thing that got a bit old and annoying was that any time the game would pause for a cut scene or a little tutorial on how to do something new there was a good second pause while it loaded and then another pause when it goes back to the gameplay.  Visually the game has a fun cartoon art style that works really well and the music in the game is well done. I’m interested to see how the multiplayer portions of Brutal Legend pan out because the single player seems great from the demo.  The multiplayer is said to have some RTS elements but I’m no sure how that would work.  Guess I’ll have to wait and see.