Let's cut to the chase. Four gameplay modes split the frame and backbone: Arcade, Championship, Great Driver Challenge, and Versus Play. Arcade allows you to try out all the tracks, at various difficulty modes (Training, Driving, and Race). Training is incredibly useful, as it allows you to drive around the track at your own pace with a red line drawn in on the road, escorting and showing the most effective route. In addition, the announcer tells you when to break and shift gears and speed up with the right amount of encouragement and genteel scolding, which is often enough to encourage a little bit more driving based on one's own accord and addiction. Arcade-Driving Mode is driving without assistance, and Arcade-Race Mode is, obviously, racing with others.

As for the rest: In Championship, you ride through a series of tracks, gaining points depending on your final position. Great Driver Challenge is racing with a system similar to Bizarre Creations' Kudos System: Points are awarded for style and are detracted after performing egregious errors such as slipping off the track and bumping into other cars. Versus Play is self-explanatory, though the lack of selectable split-screen styles is disappointing (it's always horizontal), as is the lack of choice to race with a friend and CPUs simultaneously.

Racing simulations, while not entirely esoteric, have always been a terra incognita to me. Gran Turismo and the like are all terribly overrated; they may be masterpieces of the genre and they may accomplish what they set out to do - and, indeed, accomplish it well, but high marks are undeserved if it can't cater to the niche, the mainstream, and the dilettante. That said, it was to my general satisfaction that this game was highly accessible for someone such as myself. All the tracks are unlocked from the beginning and there are no license tests or rudimentary tasks. However, in upholding the prestigious Ferrari license, the game still relies on realistic physics and customization, along with iniquitously unforgiving difficulty. Hours upon hours, or even a day or so, are required to get down all the nuances and turns of a track and even then, it's no guarantee you'll rank well; bumping into a car often sends you into a tailspin, at which point it's in your best interests to start over. For a game that has a purported arcade mode, this is definitely not pick-up-and-play. And as for customization, while you can tinker around with the little details (which effect the car to varying degrees from worthless to monumental), the car itself only has seven colors and you can't get rid of that ugly rear spoiler.

Gaudy rock music clangs and bangs loudly during the races, probably sung by Americans who were driven out of the country. In fact, the whole setup is pretty kitschy, harking back to those unusual, but nonetheless nostalgic, Saturn days. The music is as bad as ever. Ever-present are the rolling starts (though now called "driving starts," a politically corrected name and Sega's attempt to shy away from the time when someone at the company thought they could get away with crooning about, of all things, rolling starts). And every time you select something from the menu, there's a loud and gratuitous sound sample of what is probably a Ferrari revving up, though it's grating enough to make it sound more like a lawnmower.

A new version of the 2000 Sega Dreamcast game, which in turn was a port of a 1999 Naomi title, it really shouldn't be too much of a surprise, considering who is at the helm, that this is a very time-consuming simulation that's also mired with arcade sensibilities. Though Ferrari F355 Challenge meanders between the two factors and never satisfactorily coalesces, alienating the audience, the game is too raw and honest to write off completely.

· · · Sqoon