July 29, 2004 - Ed note: We received this letter and thought it was too damn good to leave in the mailbag. We had promises a wish list for this week's Forza Rapporto, but we receives so much mail that we decided to wait until we can put it all together. As far as this letter, it relates to both Forza and GT4, but was incited by our current Forza-talk. A reader, John, brings up an excellent point--one that no reader has previous brought up and one that we've quietly thought to ourselves. Here is the letter in it's entirety.

Just read some of the mailbag letters on the whole GT4 vs Forza and wanted to add something to all this discussion for everybody to think about, transmissions.

In real life if you take two identical cars, say a Honda Civic EX, one a manual transmission and one with an automatic, there are some fundamental differences. First horsepower at the wheels, where it counts. The automatic is going to lose more hp from the crank to the wheels because of the fluid transmission. Second, most automatics are only four-speed where manuals are five or six, therefore gear ratios and acceleration are affected by having an automatic or a manual.

I would love to see a racing game where these factors were taken into consideration. The games could go one step further and take into account some of the newer cars with the SMG (sequential manual gearbox) transmissions as well--if that was an option on a car. Which brings up another point, what about some really wild exotic cars that only offer a manual transmission? I don't think an automatic should even be an option in the game if it is not the case in reality.

I have played racing games for years and I have always driven manual setups in the games I play and this little missing nuance did not really become apparent to me until playing racing games online. I find that most people drive automatic cars, and, of course, the automatic cars in games have the exact same gear ratios, same acceleration, etc.

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