Forza Motorsport 2 (Xbox 360)

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The slightly goofy thing about career mode is that you can buy your way to victory as you please. Since you get a quick look at what your opponents are rolling with before a race, you can simply take your qualifying car, boost it to the hilt, and smoke the competition from the get-go. Now, that doesn't work in every situation. Some races require cars of very specific speeds and performance indexes to enter, so you have limits on what you can do. Even still, if you know how to work within those limits when upgrading, you can usually outclass the competition. If you find this a cheap practice and prefer to drive more evenly matched cars, you certainly can. But if you just want to get through the career, it's not hard to upgrade your way to relatively easy victories.

If you get tired of beating up the AI and still need to earn more money, you can hop online and take part in online career races, which earn you cash just as in the offline career races. These are the equivalent of standard ranked matches on Xbox Live, though the host does have more control over the settings of a race. Apart from the standard track and laps info, hosts can exclude certain car classes and even force any of the individual driving aids off for all racers in a match, including the driving line. Once you hop into an online race, you'll find a smooth experience. We rarely ran into any noticeable lag during our online matches, and though there were a few crash-happy online racers, you can most often weed out those players by forcing off some of the driving assists.

There's far more to the online mode than basic races. Microsoft is hosting weekly tournaments for various car classes that anyone can attempt to get in on. The system for tournaments is pretty awesome. You simply sign up for a tournament that hasn't started yet by doing a qualifying lap on the first-round track. Depending on the number of overall slots for the tournament, the number of players with the top qualifying times equal to the number of available slots gets in. From there, you race one round a day and progress depending on your placing within the race. As cool as the tournaments are, there is one odd thing about them, namely that it's not entirely clear why some racers progress and others do not. There was one instance during our testing that we showed up for a race with only one other opponent (there were supposed to be four racers total), and even though the two of us completed our race, we didn't move on to the next round. The other tournament we ran didn't give us any problems and we progressed normally, but it would be nice if the interface did a bit more to show why one racer is progressing versus another.

There is also a very strong community element to Forza 2. Apart from being able to take in-game photos of your races and upload them to the Forza Web site, you can gift and sell cars online. Gifting a car is as simple as picking a car, picking someone on your friends list, and sending it off. Selling cars has seen an upgrade from the original game. Instead of only being able to hook up in lobbies and sell cars at set prices, you can now put your rides up for auction to the entire Forza community. You just select a car from your garage, set a price, and hope someone's willing to bid. And if you're the bidder, you just put money down and hope for the best. The only issues with car auctioning are on the bidder's side. There's no way to set the maximum price you're willing to pay, ¥ la eBay, so if you're in a battle with someone over a car, you'll have to keep going back and forth until one of you gives up or runs out of available money.

If you want to sell a ride online, you're going to want to do some customizing--and not just in performance parts. Forza 2 has a huge visual customization element to it that is both amazing and incredibly daunting at the same time. The customization mode uses a layering system that lets you stack shapes on top of one another as well as resize and move them as you see fit. There are limits to the number of layers you can make, but it's a very high one. Just looking at the mode wouldn't give you the impression that it was all that impressive, but after seeing some of the absolutely bananas cars people have already made, you realize there's way, way more to it than first glance reveals. Not everyone is going to have the patience to make these painstakingly detailed decals, but for those who do, there's a lot to work with here.

Even if you don't slap a bunch of anime girls or Pringles logos all over your car, the stock rides look exceptional. Nearly all of the game's graphical oomph is in the car models. They look and move incredibly realistically, and the game's nice use of lighting and reflection gives the cars even more of a gorgeous sheen. Sometimes that sheen is slightly rebuffed when you notice a bit of aliasing around the edges of the cars while playing with a high-definition display, but apart from that, it's hard to find much fault with the car models. There's even damage modeling to enjoy, though it's not exactly elaborate. Bumpers will sheer off, fenders will dent, paint will chip, mirrors and wings will fall off, and so on. But there's no truly horrific crash damage. Going head-on into a wall at 150mph doesn't result in much more damage than you'd accrue when banging into an opponent's hatchback at 50mph. Still, what damage modeling the game does offer looks good, and it's nice that it's there at all. And if you happen to have simulation damage turned on, big wrecks will pretty much break your car, making it nearly undriveable. So even if the outward damage isn't terribly impactful, you can still screw up your car royally if you're not careful.

Somewhat less impressive, though still attractive, are the tracks. If you get an up-close-and-personal look at some of the ground textures, foliage, or other set pieces scattered around a track, they won't look so hot. But then, if you're getting an up-close look at these pieces, you're probably doing something wrong. The scenery is meant to stay to the periphery while you whip by at ridiculous speeds, and in that context, it all looks great. And that's the thing of it, really. You don't spend much time looking at the track backgrounds because the sense of speed is so phenomenal. It helps that Forza 2 runs at a solid 60 frames per second, with almost no hiccups to speak of. That fast frame rate, combined with some really fast cars, creates a sense of speed that can be breathtaking at times. If the trade-off for not having exceptionally detailed track environments is the game running at a constant 60 fps, that's fair enough.

The last thing of note about the visual presentation is the camera angles, or lack thereof. The game does feature four camera angles, two outside the car, one on the hood, and one at bumper level, and these all work great. The bummer is that there's no cockpit camera view. Games like Project Gotham Racing 3 and Test Drive Unlimited both had full-on cockpit camera views with individually modeled dashboards for each car, so it's disappointing that there isn't any such option here.

On the audio front, engine sounds are crisp and clear, as are the other peripheral sounds of a race, from tires squealing around the track to bumpers cracking as they hit up against one another. If there's any flaw to be found with the audio effects, it's that there just isn't enough variety to them. Many of the engines sound nearly identical to one another, even in instances where it seems like more differentiation ought to be present. The sounds themselves are often excellent, but some dissimilarity in effects would have been beneficial. Though there's no in-game music (unless you're running a custom soundtrack, of course), the game features an excellent array of licensed tracks for the menus from artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Bloc Party, Prodigy, CSS, LCD Soundsystem, and more.

What Forza 2 ultimately achieves is the precise brand of evolution you'd want from a sequel to the original Forza. The driving model has been made even better with the tweaks and adjustments made to it, and the features set is so remarkably deep that you're likely to lose large chunks of your free time buying, customizing, and racing your favorite cars. It's a testament to the original Forza's design that this sequel can feel both so much like the original and yet so much better at the same time. If you've got even an inkling of a theory that you might like driving games, you need to play Forza 2.

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Forza Motorsport 2 (Xbox 360): $59.99

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