Forza Motorsport 2

Forza Motorsport is a sim racer for the Xbox 360. I haven't really dug deep into the racing game genre, having only played Need for Speed Most Wanted and Burnout Revenge up until this point, but I can definitely see that Forza 2 has some real quality. The racing engine is tight, but the most addicting aspect to this game is building up a collection of cars, and painting them. 

Racing

This game is sim racing at it's very best, with only games like Gran Turismo rivalling it. The racing engine is highly

realistic, and can take quite a bit of time to master. Especially drifting is something that will take alot of time to master in Forza 2, though Giantbomb.com has a pretty  good guide up for it on the site to help you learn how to drift. The game has an extensive singleplayer, with both arcade racing where you need to do stuff like beat time scores or simply win races for fun, and a career mode. The career mode is the meat of the singleplayer, with a vast amount of events to beat. Events win you money and new cars. Getting new cars is exciting every time, and it's probably the most fun aspect of Forza motorsport 2.

On the multiplayer side, the racing has been entirely lagfree for me, although I didn't really dig deep into the multiplayer. Looking at the other dudes' cars is nice though, since Forza 2 has an incredibly paint tool to personalise cars.

Car collection and painting

Forza 2 has a large amount of licensed cars from all over the world to unlock, tune and paint to your heart's content. I believe there are around threehundred cars in the game, and attempting to get them all can be really fun, and will take you hundreds of hours. 

Forza 2 has one of the most in-depth painting tools I've ever seen. With enough skill, you can create pretty much anything, which has of course spawned a huge amount of porn cars. Attempting to sell these can get you banned

though. Selling cars to other players happens in the auction house, where you can place a car with a starting price and a buyout price to let players bid on your creations. Some cars go out for 30 million creds, while those base cars only cost like 3500000 in the game's career car shop. If you are good at painting, you can make Forza 2 fortunes. The bidding only goes in increments of about 200 though, so if no buyout price has been set, bidding can take a painfully long time, which usually causes one of the players to just quit out of pure boredom.

The game also has a large amount of tuning options, just about anything can be optimized in your rides. You can build insane vehicles with performances that go through the roof.

Forza motorsport 2 is a very good sim racer, but personally, I'm more of a fan of the adrenaline pumps you get from games like Burnout. If you like collecting cars though, this game will definitely give you your fill.