With the release of Forza Motorsport 2 from the Xbox 360 I knew that my week would revolve around vehicle's but I had no idea how much. I've been playing a ton of Forza and have been impressed with the selection of cars and tracks in the game. Forza is a racing simulator that holds itself to the highest level of realism. Now that is really cool and all but this also makes the game not so great for the casual racing fan. I really do like driving past the bumper I lost on lap 1 but at the same time I really hate spinning out of control and getting passed by everyone. I don't know how many times I've had to restart matches because I biffed in one of the turns and went from first to last but it's been a lot.

Forza does have several difficulty settings to make the game a lot more accessible. Unlike a RPG or FPS you can adjust the difficulty of specific aspects of driving. Lets say you are tired of spinning out of control like me. Well you can turn on stability control. Or maybe those drivers are a little too aggressive for you. Well you can drop them down a notch if necessary. Or maybe you are a sadist and think ABS is for pussies. Well you can turn off ABS brakes. Or maybe you'd like to know the exact perfect rout around a track. That can be turned on for you as well as break lines or you can turn them all off.

How Forza does differ is it allows you to customize your cars and shows you how to increase their performance. Most of the races have some restrictions on the horse power, weight or manufacture of a car. So often you'll get a car and need to tune the heck out of it till you can win races. You gain credits by placing in races and then you spend these credits to turn your cars. Gradually you progress through the career mode and unlock more cars and more races.

As I stated before my week has been all about vehicles and not all of them have been advanced polygons running at 60 frames a second. No, this was the week I brought my SUV in to the shop to get some minor things fixed. I just had a broken antenna, broken lock on the driver's door and this pesky check engine light. Well I guess that light actually meant I should check the engine. I had a cracked coolant pipe that was leaking into my engine through a cracked intake valve. In all I was looking at about three to four thousand dollars in repairs on a '99 Explorer with over 107K miles. Interesting enough the referred us to their sales department.

Well I packed up the entire family into the car and we drove to the dealership to see what we could buy. I was telling my wife we would not buy today. We would dick around on the price and trade-in value of the Explorer. I had checked and the Explorer's blue book value was $3,500 so I was not expecting a lot. We ended up test driving two Ford Freestars....yep that's a minivan. We liked the ride and they worked with the car seats so we decided to see what they where offering them for. The first minivan was a bare bones model that did not appeal to either of but we where not exactly in a place to make a big car payment so we might have to settle. The salesman came back with a low trade-in value and the price of the first minivan. We sent him back asking for more on the trade-in and the price of the second minivan. The second minivan had leather, 6-CD changer, fully certified and second row captain chairs for a thousand more than the first minivan. When the salesman came back with a price we liked and they doubled the trade-in offer we accepted.

I know own a minivan but am making it my goal to go as long as possible to not actually have to drive the thing. We'll see how that works out but for now I'm bust driving high performance vehicles around bendy tracks and hoping I can keep it together for an entire race without spinning out.