You dont like FM4's physics, sounds, car lists, visuals, etc?! Nothing at all it seems...
What wheel did you use and what game/wheel settings did you select?
You just ended up ranting off against MS with the typical dribble I read from brand loyalists of a single platform.. really?! You mentioned paying for online and even brought up HDMI cable (last I checked no single electronic hardware today that I know of has an HDMI cable packed in, not even the PS3) and even brought up battery packs... hdd and wifi as well!!! lolz... smh
Edit: saw you said CSR-Elite, then the typical 'it was a friend's/at a friend's house.' So... what wheel and in game settings did you use? Any assists? Game and wheel fully patched to latest firmware?
Sorry but I am having a really hard time believing you had such a horrid experience with 1 game and not the other while using one of the best wheels on the market for both. Both gt5 and fm4 are phenomenal games especially with a wheel as good as a csr-e (I have the normal csr wheel with csr-e pedals) even though neither are perfect. I think just about everyone on here has fully acknowledged faults with both games. Go to fm.net or gtp and you will see mostly extreme defense of the preferred game with a ton of 'experience' at kiosks, friend's houses or what they have read online as fact. If I am wrong I apologize but the interwebs doesnt need more of this.
No, it wasn't at a friends house, I told him I was going to buy a xbox 360 on christmas and he was kind enough to lend me his wheel for over a month, I already have a DFGT for GT5 but with the CSR being multiplatform compatible I was able to experience both with a really high end wheel, my friend is into PC sim racing so he wanted his wheel back, I did tests on the gamepad too, DS3 vs Xbox 360 gamepad and in both cases, GT5 felt more realistic to me, it's not that Forza felt bad or anything, its just that there were things that go against common sense and real life track experience, of course I'm not a track expert but I've been to some and driven on some others and FM4 just isn't there.
For the ''in game'' settings I went with 900 degrees rotation, simulation steering, I took all deadzones (inside) to 0 and played with no assists, ABS included and tried a lot of stock cars. The same for GT5. With the gamepad, I have it with zero deadzones (inside) and maxed out on the ''outside'' settings, using normal steering and no assists inlcuding ABS, like I said it's not a thing like Shift's where the steering was odd and twitchy, it's a going against laws of physics thing because the game is playable, there's no doibt about that.
As for other things, yeah, I really don't like the graphics, I've been having technical problems and I have a decent TV with a decent HDMI cable (which btw my old FAT PS3 did come with one included 6 years ago) and visually I don't like it, I managed to get rid of the extreme track brightness and cartoon-like colors but the textures are really bad. Interiors look like the
default render from a random 3D modeling software, you know, when you haven't assigned any materials to the model or any kind of lightning, you just get a light grey 3D model with basic shadows. I swear I'm not trolling, this is how it looks to me.
Sounds, much better than GT5 but what was T10 thinking when they assigned the same engine note for all cars? the only thing that makes them different is the exhaust note, tire sounds are fine but the sound they make when you lock up your wheels is horrible, comparable to GT 1 tire sounds.
Track list, lacks variety and a lot of real world circuits.
Car list, good but flashy, too many supercars and still missing the really good ones, it's like a game made by Top Gear, you only get cars that are driven on the show or are talked about on the show. I hate this word but it describes it perfectly, ''mainstream'' car list.
With that being said, the one thing that I find really good in FM4 is the Livery Editor and in GT5, the Nordschleife and Photo Mode, thats really it.