After you have entered your horse(s) for the week you are whisked off to the track. The tracks in the game are, mostly, real tracks like Oaklawn, Belmont, Emerald Downs, Del Mar, and so on. There are some fictional ones thrown in but they work just as well. Tom Durkin also calls the races and he does an admirable job even though the calls lack the usual flare that Durkin usually brings to a race call. He simply calls out the names of the horses in order. It's cool to hear your horse identified by name but a little more excitement would have helped. Durkin isn't used to his full potential here.

The races themselves are pretty good if a bit 'arcadey'. Guiding your horse is more like riding a bicycle as you can weave through traffic with little resistance. Again, Gallop Racer is much better in this area but Breeders' Cup holds up well enough. That said, the game lacks any replay feature, which is astounding in today's sports game market. How do you make a racing game without any type of replay feature? You just had a stretch duel and won by a nose. Hey let's watch that again! Sorry, Charlie.

Perhaps the biggest design gaffe in the entire game is that you cannot quickly skip races to get to a race that contains one of your horses. There are weeks when you may not even have a horse running, but you still have to go to the track and manually "skip" each race. When you skip a race you get a little cut-scene of the jockey on the winner's back waving to the crowd, and then the game has to reload. If you don't have a horse racing that week you're going to spend literally about two minutes (on the Xbox) just skipping races, pressing the A button. It's tedious to say the least. Again, it's like no one that designed the game played Gallop Racer and saw that you could skip to your race quickly and easily. It's just plain shoddy design. Adding to the design issues is that you only get one saved game slot in career mode.

The game's saving grace is that it's a fun betting party game when you have a group of friends on hand to sit back and do some virtual gambling. You get all sorts of wagers from basic win bets to trifecta boxes. It's actually more enjoyable to sit back and watch the CPU jockeys control the horses as the camera shifts around to show you multiple angles during the race.

Still, if you're looking for a good racing game, Gallop Racer remains the cream of the crop. Breeders' Cup has a lot of potential and if Bethesda goes back to the drawing board and retools a lot of the areas that need fixing, future games in this series can be easier to recommend. As it stands now, it cannot be considered anything less than a disappointment even at the discount price of $20. - William Abner