To be fair, PGR3 was a launch title and Bizzarre didn't even get hands on the a physical final version of Xenos till around August 2005. They had vastly different pressures.

Not yet as I wasn't at my PC when replying to your post. I'm just of the opinion that it's not fair to compare the two one way or another. Very different situations.

Get a frame buffer (unaltered) grab of Forza 1 and tell me that it looks like the Jeux-France screen shots of Forza 2 -- and I will gladly tell you that you're just crazy. There are plenty of frame grabs out there for other games that show the goods off without making it look nasty.

According to various people w/i the MS Turn10 inner circle, there aren't any review copies available yet.. so OXM reviews unfinished code.. just to get first dibs on a review?

That's pretty shitty.

Common practice in reviews though, unless Dyack has his way.

The AA is going to be on par with PGR3 (i.e. 2xAA) . I found the aliasing in that to be noticeable but it was probably made worse by the weird resolution (1024 x 600). Then again, the excellent post processing probably did a lot for it.

I don't know about this game. It can't look as bad as the Jeux France shots but you have to wonder why no gameplay screens have been displayed until now. I went down in flames on GAF talking about the downgrades. Perhaps the petrolheads don't care!

Online makes or breaks it for me.

I doubt it, it's not very exclusive when every other site under the sun is free to post screens from their version.

So the Italian spinoff of OXM is the only "official" partner to get to review it yet? Does that really make any sense? I don't think they reviewed finished code.. and I don't know.. but I doubt they were given an exclusive on this review.Well that's shitty too.

It's pretty unbelievable that a game launching next (soon to be this) month has had VERY little official media going about.. have they even put up footage of the GAME (and not CG) on the marketplace for Forza 2 yet?

Unfortunately, what this other French site shows isn't a lot more exciting.

I'm curious to see the demo, more than ever.

Yeah.. look forward to seeing what this game actually looks like. I wonder who green lights CG teaser trailers anyway.. talk about mismanaging expectations.

Shame, I've a contact who knows the OXM UK guys quite well and he's a big racing nut. He's bound to have got in on that and had a go. Sadly he's off this week, I'll try and catch him next.

The official word;-
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=6247509...

Exactly. *Days* before going gold and the game will hit shelves in 29 days and we still are seeing CRAP media and scant direct feed HD gameplay.

You may want to call us haters CARB, but I don't think what anyone is requesting is unreasonable. The game is basically DONE and has been for a while (optimizations and bug fixes are what are done last as you lead up to verfication and RC).

FM2 may be the cats meow, the bee's knees, and all that good stuff but that is no excuse for the lack of *quality polished* media this late in the game. The fact HUGE press sites are demoing HORRIBLE media this close to release isn't good at all, even if the final build is better.

They are telling the world: Our game looks like crap.

Which the TeamXbox and Jeux France media absolutely looks like if you put it up against 1) their goals and 2) the competition they bagged on and 3) next gen standards, especially from a 1st party "AAA" franchise.

Like everyone else I WANT FM2 to be a great looking game (great playing should be a done deal based on FM1). Their PR and media have been utterly dissappointing. PGR3 killer, photorealistic, near CGI, blah blah blah are really far from what they are showing now.

And it is laughable. As Lebato said, they actually HYPED 3D grass... and what do we see? Little patches of sprite grass.

Lets hope the "last" build BLOWS AWAY all the other builds shown, especially the "1 month old build" magazines have. Does seem mighty odd that a build 1 month from Gold looks horrible though. (Btw, going back to me E3 2006 posts this was one of my must have/360 sellers. Between the horrible media and dead 360s abounding MS has kept me in a holding pattern. Lets hope 65nm and PGR4 can change my mind).Dead link to me.

@ DEF: I am not buying what Che is selling this time. 2 points:

#1: GDC 2007 Dan Greenawalt said the game would have variable MSAA.

#2: Many months ago Xbox.com said the game was 2xMSAA -- on conjunction with all of the other downgrades that were confirmed.

Turn10 has known for many months the game would NOT have 4xMSAA. Of course these are the same guys who sold the, "60fps doesn't require motion blur because 60fps is all the motion the eye can see" crap.