Driving sims are not interesting or fun for 90% of game reviewers. Forza has always been easier, more newbie friendly and full of non-driving features. Reviewer love this crap. They play for 10-12 hours, then slap a review together. Of course they know little about the actual driving and the amount of hours they play these games for barely scratches the surface. Go read a GT5 review, all you will see is nonsense about menus and 2D trees and very little about racing or cars.
So in short, being better reviewed means very little in this genre. It's about driving and Forza still has poor wheel support and forced assists. It get high marks based on presentation, menus, playing dress-up with cars, rewind, etc. Stuff that is style and not substance.
Why are people insulting GT5 for a big update, you guys would rather have a "new" game every other year and pay $180 for nearly the same game? I'd rather have one game with continuous support.
Games, and I use that term heavily, are judged as a sum of all their parts. No one is insulting GT5 for having a big update. I think it was just about pointing out the PR move of releasing the update at the same time of the F4 release.
I agree that reviews often focus on parts of the game that aren't directly related to the "driving", but I actually take it one step forward to say that style, presentation and overall design must be taken into consideration as a gauge of the overall quality of a product. GT5 could have included a driving sim with with the technical accuracy equivilant to that of a Level-D flight simulator and it wouldn't matter. Remember that many GT5 reviews were actually quite good.
Is Forza a better "driving" simulator? Who knows. Personally I think neither should use the term sim in any sense. Bottom line, it is more accessable, consistant and by extention just easier to play (not talking about difficulty).
It's easy to stick a nose up and say that GT5 is better simply because the cars "drive a little more realistic" and then talk about how people focus on style and not substance, but at the end of the day it's about enjoyment, and by if a game makes it a PITA to get that enjoyment, one shouldn't be surprised when it is judged accordingly.
Plus lets be fair, this "big" update wouldn't even have happened in the first place had there not been a such a fervent demand for changes by GT fans. If GT5 was so good out of the box, this thread wouldn't be here.