Every week, Forza Horizon 4 features a new Forzathon weekly challenge. These charge you with owning a particular car and using it to complete a series of challenges. This past week's challenge has been called Horizon Anniversary and marks the release, six years ago this week, of the first Forza Horizon. To complete it, you need to own a 1995 Volkswagen Corrado VR6, rack up two million skill score with it, win a race in it, and carry on racing to earn a few clean racing skills.
It's a fun challenge that, as intended, instantly sparks memories of Forza Horizon's opening moments. That game offered you a brief blast in its cover star - a brutish SRT Viper in wasp-striped yellow and black - before showing the Viper roar past a group of hopeful drivers milling around their humbler rides by the side of the road. One of these, a young man loafing on the bonnet of his red Corrado, was actually you, and the VW hot hatch would be your starter car in the game.
It's telling that you remember that red Corrado, just as it's telling that Playground Games chose it for this week's memorial challenge over the Viper (a similar recent challenge celebrating the launch of Horizon 3 was focused on its even more extravagant cover car, the Lamborghini Centenario). In most racing games, the warmed-up daily driver you start in is not the car that is going to linger in your memory; it's the equivalent of the useless level 1 'traveller's helmet' you have equipped at the start of an RPG, to be discarded as soon as you can afford better. (In fact, starter cars as such have gone out of fashion, and the majority of modern racers hasten to put you in something quicker.) But Forza Horizon is not most racing games.
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