Forza Motorsport 2 [X360]

Single player mode not doing it for you? Fire up the online mode. You'll find a commendably complete set of racing and community functions. You can auction cars to other players (for pretend Forza money, naturally), watch others race, compete against your fellow Forza players, race in an online career mode -- the whole lot. As we're increasingly coming to expect from Xbox Live games, it Just works: Every feature you could hope for is in there, and the interface, as usual, is slick and trouble-free.

Another interesting detail will be to see how the demand for individually customized cars pans out. In the original Forza, some talented players were able to use the game's comparatively limited painting tools to create astonishingly complex designs. It's not hard to see those fetching big (virtual) bucks.

Picking holes in Forza 2 is not easy. But our only real gripe with the game is that the car list is a little, well, pedestrian. All the usual suspects are here, but it would have been good to have a few more oddball selections. Where's the Ariel Atom? The Bugatti Veyron? The Caterham 7? Fingers crossed that the developers are holding back the off-the-wall stuff for the inevitable downloadable updates. We'll see.

To put it mildly, Forza 2 is not a difficult game to recommend. Not only is there no driving game on the Xbox 360 to match it, there is no current-gen driving game to match it, period. Any car fan with a 360 in the house is sure to be delighted with Forza 2. You'd be crazy to miss it.