On the other hand, there's nothing stopping the idiots in multiplayer matches who love to just slam into other racers right off the mark and hamper their ability to race as normal. Still, competent hosts tend to boot these types of players from the room in short order, and all things being equal when you find a good group of guys to race against who are just in it for the fun it can make for some of the absolute best experiences that Xbox Live has to offer.

Players can customize both the performance and visual style of their vehicles via tuning them and applying vinyls to their exterior. Everything from flames to tribal designs to lettering comes with the game, but using primitives in various ways players who have a knack for it can make incredibly detailed representations of whatever it is they want from styling their vehicle after movie cars featuring the same ride to styling the entire car after The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Though its direction and voice over had some hand in it, the Forza Motorsport 2 TV commercial is often at least initially mistaken for an actual car commercial of some kind. This is due in no small part to the absolutely stunning graphics that the game is capable of presenting, where the environments are almost as detailed and realistically rendered as that of the cars themselves. Lighting effects make the cars gleam in harsh sunlight, tread and skid marks stay on the track for the entire duration of races as a sad reminder of where your Porsche got the better of you, and the race replays are the kind of things that makes a gamer call over the entire family to show them how amazing a videogame can look.

Regardless of your level of familiarity with the nuts and bolts of real world racing, this is a game that not only captures the competitive spirit of wheel to wheel racing but does so in a way that is genuinely fun and somehow skirts the mundane feeling that plagues other games in the genre. Forza Motorsport 2 has officially set the bar.