Forza Motorsport is partly a racing game and partly a brazen act of corporate hubris. The racing part is like the racing part you have encountered over and over. You drive shiny cars on exotic race tracks, you win prize money, and when you have enough you spend it on faster cars and shinier accessories. You will like the racing part very much. The hubris part you may also like, but that will depend on your personal perspective on the current Video Game Wars.

Here is some background. This week, the disparate players that make up the global video game industry have gathered together in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. Game developers are there. Game publishers are there. Hardware companies are there. Software companies are there. Great numbers of chesty babes are there in snug t-shirts, paid to hang out by exhibitors' booths and draw the attention of pasty geeks.

E3 gets a little bigger and a little sillier every time, as the armies of P.R. specialists strain to top the previous year's hyperbole. If it is May, you know you will hear a lot of bluster about The Rise Of Digital Entertainment and The Hub Of The Networked Home. This year, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are all revealing their plans for the next generation of video game consoles, and also their plans for total world domination.

You will recall that Sony's PlayStation 2 won this round's fight for market share. There are many reasons for that, but the bizarre popularity of a driving game series called Gran Turismo deserves at least some of the credit. Apparently real cars and punishingly realistic physics are hot. Millions of players sought it out and paid cash money for it, and today, long story short, Sony owns the Driving Simulation segment of the market. Forza Motorsport is Microsoft saying "Not anymore, you don't."

The game incorporates all the features that made Gran Turismo so distinctive. There are huge numbers of real cars, all rendered in beautiful colour and gleaming chrome (even the Mazda Protegé looks glorious). There are many, many race tracks, with purpose-built speedways mingling in with street courses. There are endless chances to customize and upgrade and generally spend money on your cars.

The difference, and it is enormous, is that the actual driving in Forza Motorsport is fun. It is fun when you first approach it, and it is more fun once you've had 10 or 15 races, and it is still more fun as you achieve Total Mastery. This is impressive, and it is more impressive still when you consider that all this fun is achieved without the help of flamethrowers or banana peels or any of the other tricks racing games use to make themselves seem more like leisure and less like commuting. The core is that Forza Motorsport is happy to have you as a driver no matter how raw your skillset. At the very beginning, you can switch on traction control and anti-lock braking and something called the Line, and your newbie ineptitude will go away and stop bothering you.

You will love the Line. As you drive, a stripe made of green arrows stretches in front of your car, showing you the ideal path around the track. The Line warns you when a big turn is coming up, so you can get your car in position and steel yourself for the attendant braking. When braking is a good idea, the Line changes from green to yellow to red. When it is time to hit the gas again, red gives way to green once more. The Line is easy to understand and immediately appealing. With the Line, you can lose a race badly and still want to try again, because you know where you went wrong and what to do differently. The end result is a racing game about racing instead of fruitless guesswork.

If you want you can switch off all the helpers, but that's only a good idea if you are very highly skilled or have something to prove. Relax. Take a load off.