Forza Motorsport 2

The tires screech as you slam on your brakes. Someone in front of you is slowing too early for the coming hairpin. Do you risk an inside pass, knowing that deviating from the line could put you off the far side of the track? Do you slow down and stay behind him in an attempt to draft past him on the next straight? Or do you forget you're not playing Gran Turismo and smash into the poor bastards rear bumper in an attempt to push him off the track?

This is Forza Motorsport 2, a sequel to 2005's surprisingly deep Xbox sim. And what do we have two years later? More of the same. In fact, if you've played the first game, you've pretty much played this, for almost all intents and purposes. And I couldn't be happier.

Let me get this out of the way right away. Forza is your typical driving sim. You've got your mix of real world and fake tracks, you've got your plethora of real cars, your multiude of tuning options, your career made up of events who's participation is limited by car choice and driver level, and you've got your single player diversions like time trials. You've played this game before. You've done it all, seen it all, and raced it all.

So why do I like it so much? There's a few things that set this racer apart from Yamauchi's masterpieces, and while they might seem minimal, they certainly add enough depth and fun to make some sim nuts like myself sit up and take notice.

For anyone who's not played the first Forza before, I must reiterate. Damage changes the game. No longer will you use your underclassed car to t-bone some A.I. driver through a corner and into a wall, propelling you to a cheap victory. You hit something here, and bam, you've got car damage in the form of increasingly worse problems with various affected car parts. Damage your steering and expect to have the car pull to one side. You'll have trouble shifting if you mess up your transmission. It makes you focus on driving properly. Now you'll have to keep to the line if you hope to compete.

And speaking of the line, the A.I. drivers don't necessarily stick to it like you might expect. They will brake hard to avoid hitting you, take a corner too hard or miss an apex altogether in order to set up a passing situation. They aren't brainbustingly stupid, which is a definite nice change of pace from the norm. They also seem to exhibit a sort of driving memory which affects how they treat you on the track. If you're a dick and constantly whack into them, they'll be more aggressive than they would be if you were polite and only passed when you had the clear advantage to. It's a healthy change up from the usual A.I.-on-a-magnetic-track thing that we've had to deal with before.

The career is long, as it should be. There's hundreds of events, and plenty of different race types. What is interesting though, is the online features. This is a definite plus after having Polyphony miss the boat last time, as there's a significant amount of stuff to do online here. There's your tournaments, your exhibition races, your series events, and your online career races, which earn you the same ingame currency your single player game does. And you can all spend it on the maddeningly addictive auction house, which is where cars can be bought and sold between players. Of course, the cars themselves aren't the attraction here, it's the paintjobs people apply to them. The sometimes fantastic, sometimes horrible, and sometimes just plain weird, paintjobs.

Which are made in the game's livery editor. A paint shop that's larger and more detailed than anything of this sort featured anywhere else. You can layer shapes, stripes, gradients, letters, and other things on each other, change orientations, colours, skew, size, placement and transparency. You've got a large amount of space to do this in, and these cars you apply these too can be sold or raced online. Photos of these creations can also be taken and uploaded to the official Forza website.

So what's something you've come to expect from a good racing sim? Audio? That's covered here extensively well. All the engines sound different. You make modifications and the audio changes. You can hear the turbo, you can hear the difference a new intake makes, and you can definitely hear it when you put a new exhaust on there. The engine sounds were all recorded seperately, and the efforts Turn 10 went to leave fabulous results. Unfortunately, the same can not be said for their soundtrack choice, which is your standard racing affair. LCD Soundsystem's omnipresent "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" rears it's ugly head for the umpteeth time this year, and it's fucking grating to listen to that while broswing the menus. Thankfully the music doesn't play during the actual races, although through the use of custom soundtracks, you can pump out all the Initial D you want.

Graphically, this game is both well done and poor at the same time. The impressive stuff is what's important. The car models are all extremely well done and detailed. They deform well when damaged, and they're pretty much perfect. Also impressive is the game's constant 60 FPS frame rate. It doesn't dip unless you're watching the AI car race, or there's an ungodly amount of smoke on the screen. Unfortunately though, you've got to deal with a fair bit of aliasing. Due to the demands of running in native 720p at a constant 60 FPS, not much can be done in the way of AA. It's omnipresent, and a blemish on an otherwise decent looking game.

And I only say decent because the environments themselves leave a lot to be desired. A *lot*. Even coming off from stuff that's a bit older now, like PGR3, you'll notice that the environments lack detail. They are spartan. Realistic, maybe, but things like the crowd, the trees, the horizon and the sky all are lackluster. There's no changing weather, or options to race at night or dusk. Things like this bring the graphics down from "fantastic" to "functional" real quick.

Thankfully, the one area that mattered wasn't skimped on. The physics are insanely real. Everything from the pumping of your ABS to your tires losing traction to the way the weight shifts to how tire pressure affects your grip, it's all modelled extremely accurately. It really feels like you're driving these cars, and I'm really impressed with just how realistic the entire package is. Everything, and I mean everything, reacts the way you'd think it would. It's impressive to no end. One thing to note about this system is that you can see the current status of plenty of car functions at any given instant by glancing at the telemetry screen. Camber, tire pressure, horsepower, torque, G-forces, spring pressure, tire temperature in three zones *per tire*, and damage to each part of the car are just some of the numbers you can glance at whenever you damn well feel like it. That's how complex this system is. It's mindboggling. While wholly transparent for the most part, being able to see exactly what's going on at any given animation frame really throws the whole thing into perspective. Even if you don't understand 3/4 of the numbers you're reading.

This game is hard to rate. I can't really give it any specific number of Micheal Jackson's out of 5. It doesn't do a lot new, but everything it does do, it does really damn well. The physics, the telemetry, the entire package screams hardcore. It's fun if you know what you're getting into, and you know this is the sort of thing you will enjoy. It won't convert non-fans by any stretch. It knows it's audience and it appeals to them. It doesn't do much new or revolutionary. It is, however, *the* total package, and it's something I'll be playing for some time.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Great review. I disagree on the "It won't convert non-fans by any stretch." I might just be an extreme case but I was never into the sim-like nature of Gran Turismo (even though I own the first 3! peer pressure) and I can't really recall why I decided to pick up Forza but I'm so glad I did. I completely fell in love with it. It has completely converted me into a car enthusiast. Even right now the only game I miss not playing (my 360 died couple days ago and I'm waiting on MS' coffin to get here...) is Forza. I just want to do a lap or two on Nürburgring in my 350z or skyline. ='(

There's nowhere I can't reach.