The Downfalls of the Horizon Festival

 One of my favorite styles in racing games of the past few years has to be the Forza: Horizon series. The concept is simple: you're at a car festival trying to win enough races to take the overall winners podium. The thing that really sets it apart from other games in the Forza series (and in truth, from most other racing games) is that you're not always on closed courses. Instead of going from the end of a race to a different screen and then into the start of another race in the set that you're trying to complete, you were actually able to explore the world around the races. Sure, you're in one particular area, such as Horizon 3's version of Australia, instead of traveling around the world, but the landscape is almost 100% discoverable. Honestly, that's the kind of thing I love the most. That happens to be the same reason I love the Midnight Club games, but those aren't the topic here.

 As a real festival, Horizon would more than likely be a menace.

 The Horizon festival can't be good for the economy, general health of the population, the general beauty of the area, or for the traffic flow in the area. The actual festival itself: the races, the concerts, and the rides are probably very popular, and the whole thing probably does make money, but is it really enough to justify having this sort of economy suck?

 The biggest draw to the Horizon is obviously the cars. The showroom, the auctions, and the events and races are what the entirety of the festival focuses on. In some instances, winning events will put up a grand prize of a car. There are literally billions of dollars worth of automobiles and parts at any one time in the festival and surrounding areas. 

720PO by RIGOS

But the influx of vehicles has to have an impact on the festival grounds and surrounding area. Where are all these cars when they aren't being driven? I mean sure, before the vehicles are awarded, they could be stored in shipping containers. While vehicles are up for auction, they'll stay in the showroom on the main festival grounds, obviously. However, what happens when Damon the up and comer won his last 8 events, the prizes of half of them being new cars? There has to be a contingency in these events. First of all, how is Damon going to get his vehicle back from Great Britain to his humble home in Ottawa? Damon gets the chance to use his vehicles in future races, meaning that at the rest of the festival he needs a place to store them. Secondly, when the festival is over, he needs to be able to not only ship them back home, but transport all of the vehicles to the shipyard or airstrip. This would require a fleet of trustworthy, experienced drivers (because let's be real, if you won a Bugatti Veyron, a Lamborghini Aventador, and a Ferrari 458 Italia, would you trust anyone else to transport them?) in order to deploy this new fleet of vehicles. And then when he returns to Ottawa, he has to figure out what to do with them...

 I'm sure that in an area where the Horizon Festival is taking place, the first couple of days might be awesome. You may have spent quite a bit of personal savings to get your tickets to the festival (it can't be cheap...) and maybe you get two good days of music, dancing, and beautiful cars and so many races. But then you have to go back to the real world. The festival continues in your town (or state/country/geographical location/continent/whatever, depending on the year) an you go back to the tedium of your normal life. You have to go to work, go shopping, pay taxes, all that jazz, and yet there are still races happening. Your restaurant is now crowded with motor-heads and festival-goers, people specifically here for Horizon. Traffic in your town gets worse. Not only are there so many more people visiting, but every couple of hours, every day or so, there seems to be a race blowing right up main street. Roads are closed more than they aren't, children are seemingly unable to walk anywhere, for their parents fear of them being splattered by an AMG G-Class or a Ford Raptor.

Forza by Hulkdad87

 Obviously, races are all about who can finish the race faster, but all over the surrounding festival areas, there are speed traps and speed zones. Both speed traps and zones clock the speed of your new RX-7, and post them to leaderboards, which not only encourage more cars to go faster and faster through the area. I understand that the main point of a racing festival is speed, but you would think that there would be some police presence. Withholding the fact that there are hundreds or more vehicles breaking the speed limit, easily making ticket quotas, the police force would be necessary to help with security for individual events, seeming as there doesn't appear to be a large force of personnel working the festival. Additionally, with the speeds that festival racers are moving, one wrong turn, one blown tire, one critical failure on the track or on the backroads, and suddenly that beautiful new Toyota Supra is wrapped around a telephone pole. Encouraging lower speeds with police presence would prevent that. Also there should be more ambulances...

 This topic (and this blog) is something I kind of wanted to talk about for a long time. I was bored in a World Geography class, and instead of paying attention, I started plodding this stuff down on my computer. I still passed the class, so that worked out alright enough