Forza Horizon 5 it’s more fun with profanity, and it is a fact. No, I’m not talking about yelling curses at an 11-year-old kidding back in kind. I am referring to the sheer joy of having rude words in front of the license plate censor in Forza Horizon 5. I actually spent so much time trying to fox Forza Horizon 5from the word bank like playing the game itself.

Why? I cannot give a single answer, although it is a tradition as old as high score tables. Growing up, I was fortunate that for some reason the machines in my local arcade didn’t keep their high scores. So, provided I didn’t dwell on it at the end of the day, I had a good chance of getting my name on the highscore board.

And by “name,” I mean “nob,” “bum,” “poo,” or any other three-letter word my youthful mind might conjure up. Back then, arcade makers didn’t have a censorship mechanism in place, so at the end of the day, the machines’ pull mode would activate:

1. ASS
2. HOBO
3. POOP
4. TIT
5. NOB and so on.

No, I wasn’t the only one, but for me it was a silly little act of rebellion against gaming that had eaten up a good chunk of my pocket money, even though I had willingly given it to these machines myself. -same. . And at the time, it seemed like the funniest thing in the world.

RPGs, at least the ones that put your name in the game, were also fun to play. The more po-faces they were, the better; you would have these in-depth conversations about how to save the world and then the game would turn around and call you Sir Piss.

But over the years, game makers have taken notice and started using wordlists to block out specific obscenities. Is this a colossal violation of our fundamental right to freedom of expression? Of course not. But it’s still great fun to see what you can get by with, that’s where Forza Horizon 5 and his license plate shenanigans come into play.

This open world racer asks you to make your own license plate – a plate, mind you, that will be seen by a number of other human players online. You can probably understand where this is going – I had tried naughty license plates in Forza Horizon 4, but I decided to go all out with this new Mexico-based offering.

The prospect of roaring past another car with “PISSFLAPS” in the back of my car made me laugh, but more than anything I was just determined to find a loophole in the censorship system no matter who. sworn Forza Horizon 5 blocked. To forget The Terminatorthe post-apocalyptic hellish landscape of – this was where the real battle of man versus machine would take place.

The first step was to assess the capabilities of my enemy. I was lacking a bit of tools because while the Xbox Series X generally supports mouse and keyboard, Forza Horizon 5 forced me to use a joypad to laboriously cycle through each of the eight character slots individually. But I could figure out, pretty quickly, that typing “SHIT” or one of the other “big” bad words wouldn’t work.

First turn to Forza Horizon 5? Do not believe it. I had planned this, but it made me even more determined to keep going. I could have used Google or Roger’s Profanisaurus, Visualizeswear dictionary online, but why should this battle of man versus machine be based on another machine?

I had no intention of resorting to pure slang, as I wanted the demi-obscenities I discovered to cross cultural boundaries, but I had a trick up my sleeve. I knew that “BALLBAG” was censored in Forza 4, but I had watched Rab C. Nesbitt enough to conjure up the Scottish equivalent, “BAWBAG”. Success! The censorship went unchecked, but I had no intention of stopping there; it was my spiteful response to the way Forza Horizon 5 wanted to train me in the Horizon festival. All I really wanted to do was roar around Mexico without an announcer greeting me as Motorsports Jesus’ second coming.

So I continued my assault. It was clear I wasn’t going to get away with Grade A vulgarity, but I had a few lesser successes. I got away with “VAJAZZLE”, a license plate that I had managed to get around Forza Horizon 4, but “QUEEF” and “QUEEFER” were right.

But then, quite by accident, I ran into my enemy’s weakness, and from that moment victory was inevitable. At first I was puzzled as to why he had accepted “ASS” as a valid license plate, but then realized that I had actually typed “ARSEA”. Suddenly, an idea came to me and I quickly confirmed a big game-changing revelation.

You see, the Forza Horizon 5 censor, or “language filter”, for license plates has at least two levels of blocked words. There is one set that it won’t allow you to use at all, and one that you can use with a suffix or prefix. So “ASS” was blocked, but “ARSEFACE” was happily accepted. “SHARING” was next, and from that point on, the world of rude license plates was my oyster.

That’s when the guilt hit me. I didn’t feel bad that I ignored the hard work of Playground and went straight to cursing in the game. But I felt a little bad that, while I giggled like a schoolboy, people were legitimately trying to put their name in Forza Horizon 5 and be refused. In particular, some Arabic names have been censored, although this has recently been resolved.

Hours later, I felt that I had collected enough questionable license plates, certainly enough to frown a few eyebrows as I virtually roamed Mexico in Forza Horizon 5. However, unless you dive into the foul waters of racism, homophobia, etc., don’t let that stop you – I’m sure I missed a lot. In the meantime, if you play Forza and see ARSEFACE pass, let me know.