Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights Hands-On

Earlier this week, during a meeting with THQ, we had an opportunity to spend some time with the latest work-in-progress Xbox 360 version of Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights. As the game's title suggests, Juiced 2 is affiliated with the Hot Import Nights touring auto show, and as such, you can expect to be street racing not as part of some illegal "underground" group, but on streets that have been cordoned off to traffic and are lined with spectators. Gameplay will purportedly be split 50/50 between races and drifting events, though after checking out some of the game's extensive customization features, our presentation focused entirely on drifting.

Customizing cars in racing games is nothing new, of course, and Forza Motorsport 2 has recently made the feature more popular than ever on the Xbox 360. In Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights you'll also get to create your own driver avatar and, although we were afforded only a brief look at the tools that you'll use to do it, the system appears to be every bit as robust as that employed by EA Sports in its recent Tiger Woods offerings, with several parameters available simply to determine the shape and size of your nose, for example. We're told that the finished game will feature licensed and downloadable clothing, but the outfits that we saw were pretty generic. You need a driver avatar in Juiced 2 because before each race, you'll have an opportunity to check out the profiles of the drivers that you're up against and, if you wish, make bets with them.

You'll have every bit as much freedom to get creative when customizing your cars as you will when determining the appearance of your driver, of course, and the paint/vinyl tools at your disposal appear to be very easy to work with. Your options are divided up into four distinct categories: visuals mods, performance mods, paint shop, and decals. Visual mods include body kits, new hoods and trunks, spoilers, and the like; and as in the previous game, there will be plenty of licensed parts for you to choose from. Licensed parts will also feature heavily in the performance mods section, where you'll get a discount from manufacturers whose logos appear on your car as if they were sponsoring you. When adding new parts to your car you'll get to see a wireframe diagram of it that highlights the location of your new part--letting you know exactly what you're doing and, unless you know a lot about car customization already, probably increasing your knowledge on the subject. Another really great touch is the ability to look at an "exploded" view of your car, which shows off all your parts individually and…well, it just looks really neat.

When you've finished adding appearance- and performance-enhancing parts to your car you will, of course, want to finish it off with a custom paint job that incorporates vinyl designs and such. You'll find that you have plenty of themed design palettes at your disposal, and every vinyl in the game can be resized, rotated, skewed, layered on top of one another, and basically manipulated the hell out of to achieve your desired effect. One particularly nice touch is that while you're working on one side of your car you'll be able to see the other side in a window at the top of the screen, making the options to apply your currently selected vinyl to both sides on the fly (with the second side's design either flipped or mirrored) incredibly easy to use. Unlike Forza Motorsport 2--for those of you who are familiar with it--Juiced 2 won't limit you to working on only one area of your car at a time. So during our demo, for example, we saw a vinyl being stretched across both sides of the car simultaneously in such a way that the two joined up perfectly on the roof.

Exactly how the career mode in Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights will work isn't clear at this point, but we can tell you that there will be both online and offline versions of the entire career, and that the money you earn in one version won't be available to you into the other. We can also tell you that, just like in Juiced, you'll be racing as part of a crew in some of the events. The option to gamble on the outcome of races will also make a welcome return and, in an interesting addition, spectators watching online races will also be able to bet among themselves. Furthermore, if you're watching an online race and have bet on a particular driver, you'll be able to offer them encouragement or try to put them off their game by triggering audible cheers and boos. Career events will be divided up into leagues, and in order to progress from one league to the next you'll have to complete a certain number of objectives. Those objectives include things like reaching a certain speed, winning an event, and winning a bet against another driver; so, in theory, it'll be possible for you to "beat" a league with just one or two extraordinary performances.

Toward the end of our Juiced 2 presentation we were handed the controls and invited to check out a drift event. Drift events will come in five distinct flavors, including solo drift; twin drift, which pits you against an opponent; drift king, which sees you drifting against four or five other cars; obliterator, in which the drifter with the lowest score will be eliminated at the end of each lap; and drift enduro, which challenges you to string together a drift combo for as long as you possibly can. Having been thrown in at the deep end, it took us a little while to get a feel for the controls, but they certainly seem to strike a good balance between realism and accessibility. It wasn't long before we were able to earn score multipliers by performing drift combos, but every time our overconfidence got the better of us we managed to bring those high-scoring combos to an abrupt end by impacting a wall. We were playing with the default behind-the-car view, which afforded us a good view of our surroundings, and we were told that the other options will include a true cockpit view that, among other things, will show off your custom steering wheel and seat choices to good effect.

One of the more unusual things that we noticed during our time behind the wheel was a message at the bottom of the screen that would alert us anytime our "driver DNA" was modified. Driver DNA is a new feature that, by recording your racing, drifting, and gambling habits according to certain criteria, will purportedly create a "DNA sequence" for you that can be used to make CPU-controlled cars behave exactly as you would. The driver DNA feature actually has a number of different uses, so while one of the more interesting ones appears to be downloading the DNA of friends and celebrities so that you can race against them offline or include them in your crew, you'll also be able to race against clones of upcoming opponents or get a feel for their gambling habits before attempting to make a cash or pink slips wager with them. The system used to determine your DNA is transparent for the most part, and surprisingly uncomplicated: It looks at aspects of your performance such as nitrous use, cornering, tendency to spook other drivers, overtaking skill, and such, and then rates each one on a sliding scale with "cool" at one end, "wild" at the other, and "sane" in the middle.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights is currently scheduled for release in September. We look forward to bringing you more information as soon as it becomes available.