We don’t often bother with reviews as they’re a lot of effort and words, plus most games are so boring they don’t deserve any free publicity and the most fun we get from them is putting them straight on Ebay.

But once every year or so something comes along that stops us playing Virtua Tennis and is actually worth the money games cost.

Forza 2

We thought we’d got bored of racing games, but it turned out we hadn’t – we’d just got bored of waiting for PGR3 to load.

Forza 2

On paper, Forza 2’s the most boring game in the world. It’s cars, tracks, loads of modding options, painting options, tuning options and the sort of screens we usually don’t ever bother looking at, apart from by accident when we’re trying to work out how to put it all on Easy.

Forza 2

But it’s not boring. It’s the least-boring driving game since OutRun2.

Forza 2

This is mainly because of the car-painting section, which even artistically retarded people like us can use to make the cars look awesome.

Forza 2

This has taken four hours so far. The car designing feature is utterly amazing, although you need to spend more hours than there are to make anything good. The text tool, for example, only lets you put on one letter at a time. So much as we’d like to do a SPIEL MACHT FREI design, we not going to bother. Even doing “UK RESISTANCE” would result in getting bored and stopping after just the “U” and the “K”.

Forza 2

This is the best we can manage. For some examples of what proper people can do when bothered, go over to the forums at Forzamotorsport.net where some good people have really tried hard.

Forza 2

This is what a good person has done. Staggering. When doing something else, like watching TV, shopping or what passes as work, all we can think about is getting back to Forza 2 and making a pretty car. It’s the biggest obsession we’ve had since Anna Kournikova’s bottom.

Forza 2

If you’re good at art and stuff AND can be bothered, please can you design a UKR-themed car, or an Idiot Toys-themed car, and gift it to us. We’ll do an update about it, or if more than one person bothers, we’ll do an update about them. If you’re not “scene” enough to know our Gamertag, mail in and ask.

Forza 2

Here’s something about what the graphics are like, for the benefit of our German readers: 60fps. Very pretty. Very smooth. People moaning about what Forza 2 looks like are idiots, as it’s all really pretty. Even the menus are nice, well laid out and nothing like the awkward mess of Forza 1.

Forza 2

This update reads like an advert :(

Forza 2

The game comes with some free music for listening to while painting your car and waiting for things to load. It’s really good music, all electronic stuff you wouldn’t expect a bunch of Americans to put in a racing game. There is no Bryan Adams and we are yet to come across “Song 2”.

Forza 2

We have no idea who any of the bands are, due to being really out of touch with youth culture. However, it has made us realise that perhaps some new music is good after all and maybe we shouldn’t only ever listen to the Pet Shop Boys.

Forza 2. Too many to alt-caption individually :(

Suzuka. Forever remembered as a Ferrari F355 track. Finally, nearly ten years later, games are starting to look a bit better than Dreamcast ones.

Forza 2

A SERIOUS BAD POINT: It’s hard getting online races to work. Really hard. In six attempts last night we connected to zero games, and just got error messages about the game not existing any more even though you could actually see it.

Forza 2

A SERIOUS THOUGHT: It’s odd that even now the best example of online gaming is still Project Gotham Racing 2. Why is it that new games still can’t do lobbies as good as or better than PGR2’s? This is the sort of serious, deep thought we occasionally have, before going back to thinking about who would win in a sex fight between Ulala and Betty Boo and if it’s wrong to have toast for dinner again tonight.

Forza 2

We have more screenshots of it than things to say.

Forza 2

Oh yes. The car Auction House is brilliant, and you can see it on your PC on the game’s web site. This is clever.

Forza 2

There are lots of races and cars.

Forza 2

It is nice.

Forza 2

Basically, we like Forza 2 as much as Virtua Tennis 3, which makes it only the second game this year we’ve played through choice in the evenings. This must mean it’s at least a 9/10.