Super Mario Galaxy

The Good

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• Some of the best level designs of any 3D platformer
• Beautiful, colorful graphics
• Controls work just about flawlessly in nearly every situation
• Soundtrack is a delight
• Lots of stages and tons of stars to find and collect.

The Bad

• A couple of Mario's special suits can be frustrating to use
• Minimal amount of story doesn't tie everything together especially well.

Here is the game that Wii owners have been pining for, a game that has tons of appeal for both the less experienced player and the longtime gamer. A game that deftly combines accessibility and challenge, all wrapped up in a package that's both deep and addictive. Super Mario Galaxy is all of this and more. It is simultaneously one of Mario's best adventures and a game that doesn't require fandom of the portly plumber's previous engagements to appreciate. The sheer quality of Mario Galaxy's wonderful level designs, tight controls, and brilliant presentation is the sort of thing that just about anyone who loves gaming should be able to appreciate, and that many will fall head-over-heels for.

Mario takes to the stars in Super Mario Galaxy.

The premise for Mario Galaxy begins in fairly well-worn territory. Mario receives a note from his beloved Peach to come to the castle, for she has a special "gift" for him. He arrives, only to walk straight into chaos as Bowser and son arrive in a fleet of airships and use a giant UFO to pluck the Princess' castle right out of the ground. Mario gives chase, but is unable to rescue her before the fearsome twosome jet off into space. This all certainly sounds par for the course, but it's where Mario ends up that gives Mario Galaxy its own flavor. Mario eventually hooks up with a creature called a luma, from a race that looks like some kind of cross between an invincibility star and a headless chicken. The lumas are led by an enigmatic woman named Rosalina, who lives with them on a crazy spaceship called the comet observatory. Mario learns that Bowser has made off with a gaggle of power stars used to power the observatory. To reach Bowser's hideout, Mario has to travel to all the various galaxies in the universe to collect as many power stars as he can in order to power the ship back up, fly to the center of the universe, rescue the princess, and set everything right again.

Mario 64, anyone? If you played that seminal game, Mario Galaxy's star hunt progression probably sounds familiar to you. But apart from that basic structuring, you can hardly call Mario Galaxy a Mario 64 rehash. If anything, Mario Galaxy simply takes the basics of what made Mario 64 such a dynamite game, and turns them completely crazy.

The definition of crazy here has a lot to do with gravity and physics. Each galaxy contains a series of little worlds that can't even really be called planets so much as they are floating puzzles. In many of these worlds, Mario can walk just about anywhere. When he lands on a sphere, he can walk all over it, going sideways and upside down in the process. Sometimes you'll simply jump in one area and end up gravitating toward the ceiling or walls or even another nearby planetoid without even realizing it. Often Mario will need to track down launch stars, which, when you shake the Wii Remote while standing near or inside one, will send you flying to a whole new, previously inaccessible area. There are even sections where you'll be floating through space, using specialized pull stars to hop from area to area, all while floating through the spatial void.

Practically every galaxy you explore is an absolute joy to experience. The level designs here are top flight in every regard, with tons of clever and sometimes dastardly traps and puzzles for Mario to navigate. The difficulty doesn't start off terribly high, but as time goes on, the game ramps up nicely, building the challenge steadily until the final areas, which, though perhaps a bit frustrating to inexperienced players, provides the exact sort of tough workout you've come to expect from a Mario adventure. But even aside from the challenge level, simply exploring all these various galaxies is half the fun. Whether you're floating from land mass to land mass on a giant spinning flower, running frantically around a giant series of platforms that shrink to nothing the first time you touch them, or taking on one of several terrific 2D side-scrolling areas reminiscent of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, you won't be wanting for variety while playing through Galaxy's dozens of levels.

In a sort of nod to the suit-happy gameplay of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario can don a number of different costumes that give him new abilities. For instance, in several levels, Mario can take on the abilities of a bee, buzzing around through the air via his new pair of wings, and wall-climbing specific honeycombed areas of the environment. With others, Mario can freeze water to walk over it, launch fireballs (natch), fly, wrap himself in a Mario-sized spring and jump to great heights, turn invincible (natch, again) and even turn into one of those pesky boos, allowing him to float around and pass through some solid walls. In most cases, the game takes great advantage of these abilities in the context of each level. A few involving the bee suit are a bit frustrating (given that you lose the suit when you touch water) and the spring suit is kind of a pain to control given Mario's perpetual bounciness, but otherwise, these abilities add a great dimension to the already excellent gameplay.

All the crazy gravitational pulling and perspective shifting is undeniably cool, and also potentially a little queasy.

Apart from the screwiness of the spring suit, there's very little issue to be taken with Mario Galaxy's controls. At its core, it controls much as Mario 64 did, but with a couple of Wii-centric twists. For one, Mario's primary attack is a basic spin move (the same spin move you use to activate launch stars). Simply shaking the Wii Remote engages the spin, and it's an extremely responsive mechanic. The one trick to it is that you have to wait a second before spinning again, so you want to make sure you're able to get away from whatever bad guy is nearby if you happen to miss.

The other key change is the addition of the Wii Remote as a pointer. Simply by pointing at them on the screen you'll collect star bits, which can be found just about everywhere and serve as both Super Mario Galaxy's currency and as a weapon. Firing star bits is as simple as aiming the Wii Remote at an enemy and pressing B to launch. But you don't want to fire off too many of those, as they come in handy for unlocking new stages later on. Only in a few specific cases does the game really dabble in true motion control, such as sections where you're surfing on a manta ray or walking on a boulder. But even these few divergences from the standard gameplay formula are largely successful and quite fun.

Mario Galaxy's journey is scattered and epic all at once. There isn't much of a thread tying together all these disparate worlds, apart from the fact that they have power stars hidden within them somewhere. And yet, at the same time, the lack of cohesion in what you're doing never really gets in the way of your enjoyment of it. Because each level is so much an island unto itself, it actually makes each one stand out all the more.

It helps that practically every stage in the game has a great deal of replayability purely on its own merits. These levels are just inherently fun to go back to again and again, and that the game gives you plenty of reason to is even better. Once you complete an area, you can go back and engage in a specialized version of it in certain cases. Essentially, comets will enter orbit in some of these galaxies, and thus change the way you play in some bizarre way. Whether it's speeding up all the enemies in an area, putting you on a timed run, or having you race against a doppelganger Mario, there's a nice variety of change-ups to experience. The adventure probably won't take you more than 12 to 15 hours if you just collect the minimum number of stars necessary to get to the end level, but you can certainly tack on a great deal more to that if you're into going back and collecting all the stars. And if you want to unlock the game's neat end surprise, you'll need to get all of them.

There is even a multiplayer component to the game, albeit a limited one. Another player can point their Wii Remote at the screen and take part in some of the basic fun, like collecting star bits, shooting star bits, and the like. You can even directly assist Mario by pointing at him and pressing A at the same time as your friend to make him do a super jump, and stop certain enemies from attacking by highlighting them with the pointer. It's not the most involved co-op mode you'll ever experience, but it can be fun if you've got someone enthusiastic alongside you.

As wonderful as Mario Galaxy's gameplay is, its graphics are even better. There simply isn't a better-looking Wii game available. A great deal of credit is due to the art design, which is simply phenomenal. The character designs, level details, animations, all of it is incredibly colorful and vibrant, and just a joy to look at. The technical engine does its part as well, keeping the frame rate drops to minor, infrequent bouts. One area especially worth noting is the game's camera, which takes a largely cinematic perspective, albeit with a limited amount of player control. You can adjust it right or left in certain areas, and go to a first-person view if you just want to look around. There are a few areas where the camera prevents you from seeing things perfectly, but mostly it does an excellent job of framing the action, especially considering all the kooky perspective shifting the game does as you run around these oddball environments. The only thing that's kind of a bummer is that you'll undoubtedly wish at some point while playing that the Wii could support resolutions higher than 480p; but even with the limited resolution, the game just looks beautiful.

Some of the new suits are seriously awesome.

Audio is also excellent, thanks largely to the top-notch soundtrack. Much of the music is made up of classic Mario tunes from a wide variety of different games, and it's all modernized and orchestrated. These are some of the best renditions of these tracks since the originals, and you're sure to be humming along as you play. There's little voice work in the game, but the few voice samples that are there are used to nice effect. It's probably better to just hear Bowser snarling than it is to hear him being a chatty Cathy, anyway. The sound effects are a touch on the shrill side at times, but the bulk of them fit the vibe of each stage nicely.

When all is said and done, the thing that really makes Super Mario Galaxy such a standout game isn't the fact that it's another Mario game, but the fact that it doesn't even need to be a Mario game to be successful. Sure, it's got all the nostalgic flavor Mario fans would want, with the updated soundtrack, familiar foes, and various other Mario-related bric-a-brac scattered throughout the adventure, but the game never leans on these nostalgic aspects as a crutch. It instead puts the whole of its focus on its gameplay design, and with good reason. You could probably swap in just about any other characters from practically any other franchise, and this would still be a phenomenally fun game. That it layers all these memorable characters and components on top of that phenomenal design just makes it all the sweeter. If ever there were a must-own Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy is it.

By Alex Navarro, GameSpot

Posted Nov 7, 2007 3:54 pm PT

Crysis

The Good

• Dynamic, emergent shooter gameplay
• Unparalleled visuals with destructible environments
• High level of replayability
• Power struggle makes for huge multiplayer battles
• An amazing accomplishment overall.

The Bad

• The single-player story ends
• Will laugh at every CPU and GPU thrown at it
• No team deathmatch.

It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany's Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.

Welcome to the prettiest jungle that you have ever seen in a game. Notice that it's starting to snow?

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a "sandbox" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

The firefights are stunning, as well as challenging, whether you're tackling North Korean soldiers or alien war machines.

It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn't just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There's all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.

Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you're handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you've found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you've got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.

It's not just infantry combat, as you can hop into almost every vehicle in the game, as well as take part in an incredible tank battle.

Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You'll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There's a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It's visual poetry of destruction. You're not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they're dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-style game.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you're under the sea.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.

The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team's base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It's an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there's plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.

Power struggle is Battlefield meets Counter-Strike meets the powers of the nanosuit.

Then there's instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it's just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.

Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times--it's that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you'll just stop and gape at what you're seeing. Sometimes it's just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it's something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They're capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that's staggering.

You'll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that's both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It's doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It's annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.

This is a backwoods redneck's worst nightmare: North Koreans, aliens, and a tornado.

The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial "moans" that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you'd expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit's cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.

If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.

By Jason Ocampo, GameSpot

Posted Nov 13, 2007 12:01 am PT

Forza Motorsport 2

The Good

• A phenomenal driving model that's appealing to both beginners and experts
• Races just feel right, from the great car physics to the top-notch opponent artificial intelligence
• framerate consistently holds steady at a brisk 60 frames per second
• Tons of cars to buy and modes to race them in
• Customization is ridiculously deep.

The Bad

• Racing sound effects aren't as varied as they could be
• Could have used a few more tracks.

It's exceedingly rare when you can say that a driving game is built for everybody. Considering how splintered the driving-game audience can be, with the hardcore sim-savvy fans on one side and the more casual, arcade-oriented crowd on the other, most games that have tried to appeal to both markets haven't pulled it off. However, Microsoft's Forza Motorsport for the Xbox flew in the face of other such failures. It created a game that was both easily accessible and remarkably deep, with a challenge level so scalable that you'd be hard pressed not to find some setting you liked. Now, Forza has come to the Xbox 360, and expectations are understandably high. In most regards, Forza Motorsport 2 delivers on those expectations. Not only does it continue to improve and tweak an already fantastic driving model, but it also piles on more cars, more tracks, more modes, and more features than you'll know what to do with. That's not to call the game flawless, but for every little quirk that pops up in Forza 2, there are a myriad of awesome elements to make those issues practically irrelevant.

Forza 2 cobbles together more than 300 cars from 50 major manufactures; a ton of licensed, aftermarket parts and upgrades; and 12 racing environments, several of which are real-world tracks like Laguna Seca, Mugello, Sebring, and the dastardly Nürburgring. It's a healthy jump in content over the original Forza, especially with the cars. Looking down the list, you'll race in everything from a Volkswagen Golf or Mini Cooper to top-of-the-line Ferraris, McLarens, and Saleens. It's a huge list, with tons of custom-built variations on popular rides and exceedingly fast racers. Between the 12 tracks, 47 different ribbons are available, meaning many of the tracks can be raced through a host of different ways. The best tracks in the game tend to be the ones based on real life. A couple of the tracks can be real snoozers, but even they have a ribbon or two that can be fun, given the right situation.

None of those cars would make a bit of difference if the game didn't drive well--so it's good that it does. Cars are built out in such a way that they all have an individual feel on the track. Of course, you'll feel the difference between an Enzo and a Beetle, but you even feel the differences between a Beetle and a Golf. No two cars feel quite alike, and that's understandable given the wide variety of statistics and parts unique to each car. In nearly every case, cars feel just right as they speed around the track. Each car's physics are spot-on, and you almost never get the feeling that the car you're driving isn't behaving true to life. The only time the physics get a little wonky is with collisions. Basic bumps and rubs look and feel right, but big head-on collisions seem oddly understated.

Another thing that sets all the different cars apart from one another is the new performance index rating system. Cars are still classified through a lettered system (D-class cars are the lower end of stock, store-bought rides; S class is all high-performance vehicles; and so on), but the new performance index now separates out cars within their own class by assigning each a numerical value based on individual stats in speed, acceleration, braking, and the like. Upgrading cars with new parts boosts the PI, and if you go over a certain number, the car will actually move into a new letter class. Seeing the PI of opponent cars versus your own lets you know exactly what you're up against and, in some cases, if you need to spend some cash before you're able to compete.

What primarily makes Forza 2 such a joy to drive is the way you can scale the difficulty to your own skill level. If you're a novice player and don't know a Gran Turismo from a Need for Speed, Forza 2 eases you into simulation driving nicely with several driving-assist features. There are basic ones, like stability control, antilock braking, and traction control that all work to keep your car on the road without too much duress. The big feature in the original Forza was the dynamic driving line assist, which essentially put a big line of color-coded arrows along the track (green means accelerate, yellow means slow down, red means brake), dictating the ideal driving path. This same line is present in Forza 2, but there's also a modified version of it that only shows braking spots. This ends up being the ideal line to use, as the original line has a tendency to become something of a crutch. Here, you're really only getting help with the turns, and once you've run a track a few times, you can usually get a good feel for where every ideal spot for deceleration is. If you're already into the hardcore driving sim genre, these features probably sound more annoying than anything else. Fortunately, you can turn it all off and get the full, realistic driving experience if you like. Doing so does make the game significantly more difficult, so consider yourself warned.

Even with all the assists turned on, careful driving is a must in Forza 2. Take a turn slightly too fast, and you're spinning out in the rough. Likewise, driving too passively will drop you down in placings fast, as the artificial intelligence will capitalize quickly. That's what you'd want in opponent AI, of course, and in most every situation, opponent drivers behave smartly. Unless you give them a reason to, opponents rarely bump or slam into you; instead, they concede corners if they can't pass you cleanly. And if you happen to start slamming around like bumper cars, the AI will adjust accordingly, with more easily intimidated opponents backing off and more aggressive opponents knocking you off the track if they get the chance. Generally though, they'll stick to their racing lines and drive professionally. In a sense, you know the AI is good because you don't find yourself thinking about the other cars much, except at moments where you're fixing to pass them or one of them is aiming to pass you.

There's more to Forza 2's driving model than great physics and smart AI. The driving interface is another huge factor in what makes the game so enjoyable. While driving, you can bring up a variety of different menus that show where your car is damaged, the temperature of your tires, and even some advanced telemetry data that might look like gobbledygook to a more casual player, but these give fantastic insight into the performance and status of your car for those who know how to read it. These options are what sets Forza 2 apart from other games of this type.

Perhaps the best overall aspect of Forza 2 is that it gives you so many ways to experience its fantastic driving model. You can start out participating in exhibition races or time trials, hop online to take on the rest of the world, or dive right into career mode, which is the true meat of the game. Career mode starts you out picking a region to call your home, with options of North America, Asia, and Europe. Specifying a region essentially dictates what brands of cars you want to establish a relationship with early on, and you'll quickly find yourself earning discounts with automakers from your region.

With a region picked out and your first car bought, you'll be presented with only a few unlocked racing series and a driver level of one. From here, it's race, race, race. The career mode is where you earn all your cash and boost your driver level. Boosting your cash flow lets you buy new cars and part upgrades, while upping your driver level earns more discounts on cars and unlocks new races to take part in.

What's neat about the career mode is that it finds ways to keep the progression fresh, even if it is putting you on the same courses again and again for dozens of hours. You'll encounter region-specific races, class-specific races, ones limited to certain levels of horsepower, and the ever-sadistic endurance races that have you racing on the same course for far, far longer than the average five- to six-lap endeavor. The lack of track variety starts to wear after a bit, especially considering how long the career mode is, but there's enough variety to the types of races to keep you very much interested in finishing your career.

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, à 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.

By Alex Navarro, GameSpot

Posted May 29, 2007 6:49 pm PT