By Nathan Bronfman My driving gloves are already on It's a pretty good year to be a racing fan. Forza Motorsport 2 is coming out for the Xbox 360 this holiday season, which if it's anything like the first one, promises to be one of the great 360 games of the year. And Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby starring Will Ferrell comes out this August. Anchorman doing Nascar...we are so there. Back to Forza 2, they've got a brand spanking new website chock full of information about the upcoming game. IGN did the legwork and came up with these tidbits: Forza 2 is built using a completely new Xbox 360 engine. It's NOT Forza 1 in HD. F2 will run at 60 FPS, with reflection mapping on the cars also running at 60 FPS. The game will support the new Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel.

By Craig Schwartz We have an unnatural fear of pistachios F.E.A.R is coming to the Xbox 360 this fall, and more than a few gamers have trepidations about whether our beloeved Xbox 360 will be able to handle the oomph of this particular title. And the demo at E3, while impressive, was obviously not 100% identical. But Vivendi promises that the full game will use the highest quality graphical settings for the PC's content. We sure hope so. Eurogamer recently did an impressive preview of the upcoming game. From Eurogamer: Setting that aside, the 360 demo gave us an idea of what Vivendi was talking about when it mentioned new single-player content in its original announcement. Apart from a myriad of tweaks (word is that regeneration of the slow-motion meter is quicker, and analogue control felt almost-right with functions sensibly dotted around the 360's excellent pad), there's a new "Instant Action" mode, absent from the PC game, where the idea is to go through a level taking on huge numbers of enemies with as much speed, efficiency and lethality as possible. The level we played was split into identikit sections, with a yard full of grunts followed by a corridor of mechanised walker [the best kind of corridor - John].

By Craig Schwartz Microsoft busts out the Turtle Wax Microsoft sure picked a strange day to do their massive Xbox 360 dashboard update, but sacrilege aside, we welcome it with open arms. Oh, and if you're planning to go see The Omen today, our sources say it is truly hideous. And not that good kind of hideous, either. Here's nitty gritty of what the update will do to your incredibly outdated dashboard: Xbox Live Marketplace Enhancements New background download manager gives gamers the ability to queue up and download six high definition items at a time including playable game demos, Xbox Live Arcade games, music videos and movie trailers while actively playing games or browsing the dashboard. As an added benefit, if gamers engage in multiplayer gameplay while downloads are in process, the new background download manager will automatically pause the download queue until the multiplayer session is complete ensuring a continuously optimal gameplay experience.

By Joel Barish And not in a good way Xbox UK boss Neil Thompson must have been a tad jealous of all the tussling Microsoft's Chris Lewis has been getting into and decided to jump in the fray as well. He feels that Sony is forcing the Blu-ray on gamers who don't particularly want it. From an interview with Eurogamer: “Sony are now making people pay an extra few hundred pounds for a Blu-Ray DVD drive which we don't know is going to be the standard in the next-generation DVD formats,” Thompson insisted. “This is the company that brought out Betamax – we don't quite know where they're going to go with this,” he added, in a pointed reference to Sony's defeat in the format war against VHS (note for younger readers: sort of like a cross between DVDs and "cassette tapes"). I'd almost consider the punch to below the belt if it weren't true. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, plans to offer an HD-DVD drive as an optional add-on later in the year.

By Nathan Bronfman We want one incredibly bad, for the record A report by The Diffusion Group gives Xboxers a glimmer of hope for something that they've always hoped and dreamed for: a portable Microsoft product to compete with Sony's PSP and Nintendo's GBA and DS by 2008. From the TechWeb article: "It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to enter the portable gaming market by 2008," said Thomas Wolf, TDG analyst and co-author of the report. "There's no point in the past 15 years where the industry has sustained this type of competition we're seeing today, and Microsoft has the brand power and marketing budget to pull it off." By 2008, the XBox 360 will have several "solid" years to penetrate the market, which would give Microsoft additional "power," Wolf said. What does Microsoft have to say on the subject? Naturally, they've denied repeatedly in the past. But even Bill Gates fueled the rumors when he was asked about a portable media player at the "D" conference and responded enigmaticly. "We have no announcement to make today," Gates said. "We are looking at various ways to bring more to that space. There is a lot yet that hasn't been done."