A quick trip to the Hock Shop proved quite fruitful. As I don't usually frequent these establishments I was pleased to find Forza Motorsport 2 there, for a very low price of five dollars. I thought it was a mistake. Fifteen perhaps, but five? They had three copies in, all of which had perfect cases and intact manuals free from harm. So I looked at the other games there, and none hit the single digit dollar mark. Even those Burger King games started at ten dollars a piece (didn't we just pay seven for those new?).

So I had to pick it up. I had wanted to play the original FM for the XBox a long time ago but just could never bring myself to it. And we probably have Project Gotham to blame for that. And Gran Turismo. A man can only handle so much racing, especially racing simulation. So I was also tempted to get FM2 when it came out a while back but wisely settled not to, and spend the money on more useful things (but probably not).

With the recent trend of renting games at the relatively inexpensive price point of ten dollars, I thought I would just rent this game sometime down the road when there was nothing else. But when you cut that price in half and tell me I can keep it forever, well, sign me up.

So yes, I did start playing, which means the Orange Box will have to be put on hold. And I'm pleased to say I'm very happy so far. The game is much easier to get into than Gran Turismo, and it doesn't look like it's going to suffer from the same issue where you just get stuck at a certain point as you have to re-race the same track hundreds of times just to afford a decent ride. The difficulty is adjustable all over the place, and the only penalization for taking on easier settings is a percentage hit on your income. If you ramp up the difficulty, you get more cash. Simple as that.

But what really gets me is the whole start-up process of "new" games, and by new, I mean games you have never put into your system before. Every game I have ever put in requires an update of some kind. For a while it seemed like every HD-DVD I put in required that too, which just blows my mind into the back of the couch. We are forced to wait for the download as it installs, doing who-knows-what to your game, and then reboots the system. Today it took me about seven minutes just to get to the title screen.