Forza Motorsport 3

Forza 2, with all the assists on, was a desperately dull drive. You'd have to take it most of the way to simulation settings to discover the immense physical involvement the handling model offered. Forza 3 feels more like you can shape it into whatever you want. With all the assists on, it's a stupid, pretty, fun game of dodgems. By tweaking the custom settings here and there - stability off, ABS on, traction on - I managed to get the Corvette to behave almost exactly as it would in a PGR, with sharp turn-in and deliciously controllable oversteer. Go to full sim, and you're in the rarefied world of a RACE Pro (and, probably, the gravel trap).

It's a livelier game then, and an initially friendlier one. Start a campaign, and the voice of English TV actor Peter Egan asks how familiar you are with racing games in tones that would only fail to soothe you if you were Richard Briers in Ever Decreasing Circles. Pick a car from the starting line-up - we're only given time to spot the Ford Fiesta Zetec S, but they all appear to be small hatchbacks - and hit Season Play, and the game immediately suggests three events (with bold, colourful posters) to choose from, suitable for the car you selected. Pick one and it feeds the races into a calendar, highlighting the Sunday finale as a double-credits, double-XP star event.

This is Forza 3's method of spoon-feeding its content to you. It might sound a little condescending, and in truth it doesn't change the structure of the game at all. At any point, you can switch out to a sober grid view, a veritable periodic table of motor racing covering the entire game, with events as tiny squares coloured according to whether you've unlocked them, and whether you're in or have a car suitable to take part.

Season Play might be superficial, but that doesn't mean it wasn't necessary. Forza's Achilles heel was always the structure and variety of its career mode, which lacked excitement, imagination or, frankly, any distinguishing features at all, and could get old fast. It was just an endless sea of races. Adding drag racing and ovals is only going to do so much to change that, but the rhythms and carefully selected short-term goals of Season Play will do plenty to help you get through it.

Getting through it earns you two things - credits and XP, both of which can also be racked up in multiplayer. XP levels you up, which unlocks new events, while credits buy cars and upgrades. Another nice piece of streamlining is the easy upgrade option, which hand-picks optimal packages of tyres, aero parts, turbos and so on according to your car class and budget, and presents them to you in simple terms: changes in weight, power, lateral Gs (cornering ability, in other words) and Forza's excellent numbered class system. Needless to say, you can ignore this and spend as much time making your own choices in as much detail as you'd like, and tuning will doubtless still be the preserve of the true car geek.

The least known - and perhaps, most interesting - aspect of Forza 3 at the moment is the community features. With its amazingly powerful paint shop, and Forza 2's auction-house culture which promoted a brisk virtual business in paint and tuning jobs for the talented few, the series was a quiet leading light for user content on consoles, long before LittleBigPlanet. Turn 10 is determined to build on this with the addition of a video editor, but hasn't said much yet about how it proposes to promote the content itself to the wider population of players - something which has been the stumbling block for all such games so far, including LBP. They'll only say that they have big plans for the auction house and leaderboards that will highlight the community's best creators, and will show more soon.

Frankly, if they said nothing, we wouldn't have to wait that much longer to find out. Forza Motorsport 3 is due on 23rd October - and "we'll hit our date", the Microsoft man says firmly, several times. It's odd that a game whose existence was only confirmed a couple of months ago will be real so soon, and in that circumstance it's also odd that there's not more to say about it. But it's really very simple. Forza was always great; this time, there's more of it - more stuff, more depth, bigger and better numbers - and it's easier to get into. You can't say fairer than that.