So am I the only one who's excited about his and bought 2 copies today?

I asked who was getting it for 360 a couple of weeks ago... no one replied, so I got the PC version.

Got it on 360.
It's early to form much of an opinion, it's a lot slower to get going in this one than the last one.
However, the car sounds are horrible and shifting gears is so slow I'm getting pretty frustrated with it. I shift faster than this in a parking lot, "spirited driving" in a game should be a heck of a lot faster than this. It's worse than Shift in this.

Still waiting for mine to arrive from Amazon (PS3 edition).
I noticed the PSN store has all the pre-order cars on sale already, including the Casino.

And Happy Birthday BTW.

Thanks!
Stepping up in cars made driving a lot more fun. Shifting is vastly improved.
Enjoyable game, the only problem so far being getting on the same server with friends to get "locked" so you can continue to travel together. The first TDU had this same problem at first. A lot of "server unavailable" errors, which I think is a generic error message. We got that for starting a club and 100's of times when trying to sync up 4 of us on the same server. Eventually it worked and we got locked though.
I think there is a LOT of the original game in this, bugs and all, mainly some updated graphics and map. Interesting that Hawaii is also in this, I didn't know that would be part of it. Nice surprise!
Still impressed with how improved driving is, the wheel wasn't an afterthought this time (wheel support was added to the original with a patch). Much less pinballing around, which results in fewer cop chases.

Happy b-day RaK

I loved the first one and will be picking this one up soon

I missed your post Mags re who's picking this title up, I'm still not sure as to what version I should buy

So you're saying that the first cars you get drive like crap and shift horribly, but as you get better cars, they're better and more fun?

I have the first one and am thinking about picking this one up.

Exactly. First car choices are pretty horrible, avoid the Mustang, doesn't compete well like the Lancia. At about the A2 class the cars start to get interesting.
Thing is, in this game you have to go to racing school for a license, buy appropriate car, then go run a championship, get next license, buy car, run championship...
So, I have a car I need for the championship and a Nissan GTR on the side for the fun stuff. The GTR is SWEET and well priced...about what an Audi TT Coupe was.
Pricing is odd, a car wash is $1500, a shirt $300 but a GTR is just around $50K IIRC. LOL

You can sell off cars you've bought, but apparently not any that you win. I haven't won one yet, but I think you get stuck with a pink Mustang during the storyline which takes up space in your garage.

The big put off in the game is the connection issue I mentioned. A game like this is fun for a while in SP, but needs MP cruising with buddies to keep alive. With all the trouble to connect, I don't know how long this will remain fun.

With it being near-launch day I expect their servers are getting a bit hammered but it will tail off.

Sucks about the pricing and the award cars. Sounds like they looked at money sinks and how the economy worked in the previous game and had other plans for it.

Sounds right. I never got to the top shelf rides in the last game because too much grinding was involved. I'd love to see an option to make cash by renting out properties or cars, similar to Fable. If they wanted to get real fancy, let other players on your friends list rent your rides too.

Something they have to balance though, is that some cars are "overpriced" IRL for their performance level, as auto manus' charge for both luxury and performance. For example, the STI/EVO can easily match some of the performance luxury cars nearly twice their price.