I treat FM.net like I treat Sony's official GT forum (and to some extent gtp in general but not as a whole). I just lurk at most and tend not to post much, if it all. Heavy bias is what moves me away from them. I play both franchises, enjoy both franchises, and have love/hate relationship with both. Currently GT5 I still play albeit I'm still not happy with the outcome even after all the patches because it was released a buggy mess after all these years and still has issues to this day. I don't think FM4 is perfect by any means but for me it's simply the better, more consistent, more fun game. Biased sites like those mentioned will get you flame baited into arguments, labeled as a fanboy or troll, get your posts edited/deleted and you can even get banned by simply asking legitimate questions. And you can't debate things with folks who have little to no experience with the competition. As a multiplatform gamer I win at the end of the day. I play both, enjoy both, and recognize the pros and cons of both, Single platform owning/single franchise playing 'gamers' tend to spin and deflect any con and bash the competition for no reason whatsoever. It's sad, but I'm in full agreement.. if a game was released horribly and was a multiplatform title it would be thrashed to bits. Since there's so many 'fans', their defense actually hurts the franchise more than it helps. When the developer hears the cries, they go back and try to fix the issues. When they only get praise and worship, they tend not to think there's much wrong with their game. I just wish that some of the most faithful of either franchise would acknowledge the faults and speak out about them rather than worship and praise every little nuance of said game.
It's why I point out the standard vs premium quality in GT5. I have said it many times that I think when all is right, with premiums and all, that GT5 is bar none the best looking racer ever, photorealistic even. But that can only be true for 20% of the content since the majority is the low rez ported stuff. If speaking of how great the visuals and features are, folks need to realize the lack of consistency in the game and the fact that the majority of the game isn't the premium level but rather the standard stuff. In Forza 4, things are a whole lot more consistent but the content, even if touched up and editted and tweaked, the bulk of it carried over. This is true for the majority of car models, the wheels, the tracks, the modding/tuning, etc. The game certainly plays differently (and much better than before) and sounds a whole lot better, looks a whole lot better, and the extra features and tweaks to existing features are great but it still doesn't hide the fact that the wheel selection is the same except for 3-5 new wheels (?) and that, including FM3 DLC as FM3 cars, we got only 90 new cars to the series (sans DLC). Forza 4 to me is still much better than GT5, but not by leaps and bounds better.
