It gets better, once you have unlocked all the "skills" (like In Air Control using weight transfer, Turbo, Slipstream turbo, burnout, two wheel driving). The last one is two wheel driving unlocked at the end of LA. Then Paris and on is all about just unlocking cars and the races are both long (no laps) and challenging with some realy good places to catch massive air.

I warned before that there is nothing realy realistic about the game but at least your car can get realy beat up unlike some racing games out there. Damage does not affect performance, sadly, but that can be overlooked.

Get the cars unlocked then get on-line for some capture the flag fun. You can set up a CTF match on your box to play against the computer in the arcade mode menu.

Oh, and menus take some getting used to. There are a HELL of a lot more options that it will look like at first glance. Most of the online games were just Cruise games, people may not have figgured out how to set the game options for on-line. That was the way it was with the PS2.