I re-played Horizon 1 to 100% with a fresh save over the long weekend (mine begins Thursday night), and I must say it's as good as I remember it when I played through it for the first time at launch. Progression feels neither too quick nor too grindy (though admittedly I cheesed a bit by finding all the discount signs, doing all the PR stunts, and winning all the showcases before doing any of the actual races). As for the story, while I don't miss the characters, I respect that the game doesn't try too hard with the story and having the characters act like they do creating an incentive to defeat them and progress. The music, aside from the dubstep, has aged like wine even ten years later and I still listen to much of the game's soundtrack regularly. Hearing "Language" is just as delightful today as it was when the game was new.
My only major gripes with Horizon 1 are the car list, which I've always felt was slim (even though it is larger than both TDUs and PGR 2-4, which I think have great car lists that hold up even today despite their small numbers by today's standards) considering all the interesting cars that FM4 had and made worse by the fact that I didn't buy the DLC while I could get it (RIP Toyota FJ Cruiser), that the lower classes are barely used (there are no E-class races and only one D-class race), and that there is no free play mode to experiment with some of the races (the street races in particular for me) in slower/faster classes.
The servers are unavailable, probably for good (as is the case for FM3/4 but not FM2 apparently), so I unfortunately can't revisit some of the rivals times I had back in the day, some of which were in the top 100.
This may or may not be a coincidence, but the rest of my family vacationed in Colorado for real during my playthrough. Perhaps I should have joined them instead of playing video games...
