Forza Motorsport

Halo 2 was my first completed game on Xbox, and I still can't believe it ended on a cliffhanger...! Next up was Forza Motorsport, which competes with the plethora of other racing games on the selling point of being able to "pimp" any one of over 200 production cars to almost any specs you can think of - tweak the engine, stick a massive spoiler on it, some top of the range tyres, some gold wheel trims and finish it all off with a really gaudy paint-job. This is real testosterone territory, and I love it! Not only do you get the fun of complete makeovers on some serious machinery, but you get to race them too - cars are rated in six classes with over 100 different races to choose from, ranging from amateur to professional to controller wrenching endurance races. Take a Ferrari Enzo around the mammoth 20km long Nurburgring at 200mph and you'll be hooked! As I have been... Over 90 hours of racing logged since I began (that's almost 4 whole days in a little over a month, gulp), over 8000 miles of track covered and over 10 million credits won. I have been into racing games since the golden days of Outrun in the 80s and this is definitely the best simulation I've ever played... Ironic really, since I've never so much as backed out of a driveway in a real car. It seems I must satisfy my need for speed in a virtual world where it's all much safer, most of the time. There is an Xbox live option on this too, which I explored briefly at the beginning, before realising the community was populated by fanatical Americans who took their racing really seriously, thus destroying the fun for the casual player. I may revisit just to teach them a trick or two now I'm more experienced behind the wheel, but something tells me it's time to move on to new pastures and get into something that requires a few more brain cells. Forza: Fun around every corner - 10/10 Kx