More than a million racing fans snapped up copies of Turn 10's Forza Motorsport 3 during its first month at retail, with players logging more than 6.6 million man hours playing online. Those man hours (as opposed to dog hours - dogs can't drive) were spent in more than 64 million connected sessions covering approximately 590 million miles of track.

In other words, a lot of people have been playing Forza 3.

And perhaps a good portion of those million people will be picking up the Hot Holidays car pack, available today, featuring ten of of the world's most anticipated race cars of 2009 and 2010. Cars like the new Ferrari 458 Italia and the latest Nissan GT-R Spec V. Cars like this:

1. 2010 Ferrari 599XX
2. 2010 Mercedes SLR Stirling Moss
3. 2010 Lamborghini LP6700-4 SV
4. 2010 Porsche Panamera Turbo
5. 2010 Ferrari 458 Italia
6. 2010 Jaguar XFR
7. 2010 Audi S4
8. 2009 Aston Martin #007 AMR Lola
9. 2009 Audi #2 Sport Team Joest R15 TDI
10. 2010 Nissan GT-R Spec V

Yes sir, that is definitely a list of cars, all of which can be yours today for 400 Microsoft points. Just make sure to save some points for January 12th, when Turn 10 releases another pack to coincide with the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Players can download the "Hyundai Genesis Coupe Car Pack" for free today, adding three different versions of the 300-horsepower Genesis Coupe to their car rosters. The pack includes the Rhys Millen Racing Red Bull Hyundai Genesis Coupe, the HKS Genesis Coupe, and a unique Forza Motorsport 3 Genesis Coupe. I'd say it's a coupe coup, if I was much cornier than I already am.

Following up the free DLC in December is a paid "Hot Holidays Car Pack", featuring a selection of 2010's most eagerly anticipated super and purpose-built race cars. Turn 10 will be slowly revealing the content of the pack leading up to the December 8th release, but it will definitely include the new Ferrari 458 Italia, with the 2010 Audi S4 accompanying the pack as a free sample. Keep an eye on Forzamotorsport.net to see what 400 Microsoft points will net you come next month.

The story of James Elterman finding a cheap livery designer via the Forza community forums is inspiring, but I'm much more interested in watching Peugeot 908 Le Mans driver Stephane Sarrazin take a drive through courses he's raced on in cars he's familiar with. The fact that he can hop onto the game and clock a time one millisecond over his actual race time is simply mind-boggling.

With the October 27th launch of Forza 3 just around the corner, Turn 10 and Microsoft are gearing up to release the full list of cars and tracks for the game over at Forzamotorsport.net. Not content with the ridiculous number of rides included in the game, Turn 10 has hand-picked 10 classic cars, bundled them up with two new tracks, and created the Motorsports Legends Car Pack. The pack includes such vintage racers as the '60 Chevrolet Corvette, '71 Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R, and the '65 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe, along with the Benchmark High Speed Ring and Sidewinder Proving Ground tracks.

The Motorsports Legends Car Pack will be available on launch day, with a special code inside every new copy of Forza 3 allowing the purchaser to pick up the pack for free. Check out the full list of included cars below.

· '65 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA
· '64 Aston Martin DB5 Vantage
· '81 BMW M1
· '60 Chevrolet Corvette
· '69 Dodge Charger
· '57 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa
· '80 Fiat 131 Abarth
· '67 Lamborghini Miura P400
· '71 Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R
· '65 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe

The only thing I could really tell you about Ferraris is the fact that I will never own one. It's not because I couldn't afford one (I couldn't), but rather I couldn't afford the worry of owning one. No one is going to steal my broken 1996 Nissan Sentra, and if they did they wouldn't get far.

These new screens represent just a selection of the Ferraris showing up in Forza Motorsport 3, with more showing up each day this week at Forzamotorsport.net, with "surprises" in store for those who keep up with the latest updates there. Oooo, surprises!

Forza 3 has gone gold, and to mark the occasion, Microsoft and Turn 10 have announced that a demo for the game will be hitting Xbox Live on September 24th, giving players over a month to familiarize themselves with the game in advance of the October 27th release date. The demo features five cars ready to race on the Camino Viejo track in the mountains of Spain.

The five cars playable in the demo are:

2007 Porsche #80 Flying Lizard 911 GT3-RSR
2010 Audi R8 5.2 FSI quattro
2009 Ferrari California
2008 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X GSR
2009 Mini John Cooper Works

All five can be driven in full cockpit view, with rollover, damage, and the game's new rewind feature firmly in place. The demo also supports online leaderboards, so you can start bragging a little bit earlier.

While we've got you, if you're in Europe, you're in luck, as Microsoft today announced the game will be out on October 23, which is over three weeks earlier than the North American launch on October 27.

UPDATE - We got a press release yesterday from Microsoft saying the game's release date was October 3. There was a typo. It's actually October 23.

If you sign up and become a VIP member of the Forza 3 community, you'll get access to these five cars.
If you sign up and become a VIP member of the Forza 3 community, you'll get access to these five cars.
Preorder the game and you'll get this...tastefully-adorned Audi.
If you sign up and become a VIP member of the Forza 3 community, you'll get access to these five cars.
If you sign up and become a VIP member of the Forza 3 community, you'll get access to these five cars.
Recognise these? Course you do. They were on the cover of Forza 2. These are available only to those who purchase the Collector's Edition.
Preorder the game and you'll get this...tastefully-adorned Audi.
Preorder the game and you'll get this...tastefully-adorned Audi.
If you sign up and become a VIP member of the Forza 3 community, you'll get access to these five cars.
Preorder the game and you'll get this...tastefully-adorned Audi.

Instead, the exact release date for the game in North America is October 27. No idea yet for Europe, but for Aussies and Kiwis, good news! It'll be out a little earlier, on October 23.

Along with the announcement, Microsoft sent along a pic of the finished box art for the game's special edition, which we told you about last month.

The latest Turn 10 update for Forza 3 reveals four new tracks across three classic Japanese racing venues for Forza 3 this week. For starters we're getting the Suzuka Circuit, one of the oldest and most dangerous motorsport tracks in the country, with 17 turns packed into the 3 and a half mile course. You can tell by the picture up top that it's a pretty brutal ride. Then we have the Twin Ring Motegi, which consists of both a 1.5 mile oval and 3 mile road course. Finally we've got the Tsukaba Circuit, home of the Revspeed Super Battle, Japan's original time attack.

On top of the three courses, Turn Ten is also revealing seventeen new vehicles for the game, from the sporty 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX MR to the rally-bred 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX Sti. Check out the full list below to see if your favorite ride made this week's cut.

This Week's Cars:
Production 2009 Lexus IS F

Production 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe Sport

Production 2009 Mazda Mazdaspeed 3

Production 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX MR

Production 2010 Nissan 370Z

Production 2009 Nissan Versa SL

Production 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STi

Production 2008 Toyota Yaris S

Production 2009 Honda Fit Sport

Race Car 2008 Nissan #12 CALSONIC IMPUL GT-R

Race Car 2008 Nissan #23 XANAVI NISMO GT-R

Race Car 2008 Nissan #24 ADVAN Clarion GT-R

Race Car 1997 Nissan #23 Nissan Motorsports R390

Race Car 2008 Nissan #3 YellowHat YMS TOMICA GT-R

Race Car 2008 Toyota #25 ECLIPSE ADVAN SC430

Race Car 2008 Toyota #36 PETRONAS TOM'S SC430

Race Car 2008 Toyota #6 ENEOS SC430

"We've got this clean look based on the look of a car brochure," said Forza Motorsport 3 director Dan Greenawalt. "We call it car porn.

But Forza 3 is more than just 400 cars from 50 manufacturers and 100 tracks, it's developer Turn 10's attempt to bridge the gap between racing sim and arcade racer without leaving anyone behind.

"Our goal is to turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers," Greenawalt said. "To deliver approachable and thrilling gameplay."

That's a tricky proposition when you have one group of gamers that worry over the nuance of car physics and handling, dismissing any game that doesn't match the real world, and another group that feels lost in a game that is too real, instead opting for arcade fun.

Turn-10's solution is to have a robust selection of assists which can be turned on or off on the fly. At its easiest, Forza 3 even brakes for you, leaving the gamer to hold down the gas and keep the car on the green line which shows the best approach to every turn. At its hardest, Forza 3 mimics the behavior of every vehicle, given each it's own distinct physics and feel.

The Xbox 360 exclusive also features a new rewind button. At any point you can press the back button on your controller and go back in the race five seconds. There are no limits to when or how often you use this feature in a race. It's there, Greenawalt said, so perfectionists don't have to restart an entire race after one small mistake.

And for both the hardcore and arcade race fans there are the graphics and the spectacular damage modeling.

"Part of our perfectionism is how we capture the cars," Greenawalt said. "We are car freaks, we want to capture that, we want to show these cars off, we want to worship them."

Forza Motorsport 3 features ten times more polygons in each car model and four times the texture resolution than found in Forza 2 he said. The game delivers these astonishing realistic graphics while calculating physics at 360 frames per a second.

"Our new graphics engine pushes the 360 in new ways, ways it has never been pushed before," Greenawalt said.

To create the setting for the game's tracks, like the three set in Montserrat, Spain that were being shown at E3, Turn 10 take thousands of photographs at the scene, including aerial shots. The team also worked to meticulously capture the cockpit of every car included in the game.

Damage modeling for the cars, all of the cars, is also carefully detailed. And in Forza 3, all 400 cars now include the ability to completely roll over in a race, something no racing game has ever tried before, Greenawalt said.

Getting permission from the 50 manufacturers for this unheard of level of damage modeling was a matter of talking to each individually.

"We go to a manufacturer and say we're a sim and as a sim, cars roll over," Greenawalt said.

Greenawalt also mentioned that Forza Motorsport 3 has a "strategic partnership" with Audi.

"We saw the brands meshing really, really well," he said. "You will hear a lot more about that in three months."

I'm not a big racing fan. I play racing sims, and occasionally enjoy them, but they're certainly not my bread and butter. The same holds true for real life cars.

But when Turn 10 Studios ended their presentation on stage by loading up a video they created using Forza Motorsport 3's in-game video editor I was blown away.

The fact that everything happening on screen had to be actually done in-game is unbelievable, never mind the graphics.

Later, when I cornered the Turn 10 guys at Microsoft's after party, I asked them just how long it took to put that together. About a month, they said.

Rumor: Turn 10 To Develop Project Gotham 5, Announcement Soon [AddictGaming]

here's stuff being worked on here at Turn 10 that I simply can't talk about right now, but the progress we've made in the last six months has been absolutely incredible. The fact that we're working on our second game for Xbox 360 means our software architects have figured out ways to push the 360 in ways I didn't think were possible in terms of both visuals and performance. You'll pardon me if I sound a little excited, because, frankly, I'm frickin' psyched.

Just imagine how excited Chou will be on the next next Forza game. His head will pop!

Volume 98 — July 3, 2008 [Forza Motorsport 2 via VideoGamer]

The demo version of Forza 2 will be single-player only, but will thankfully feature Xbox Wireless Racing Wheel support.

Gentlemen, start your disco naps! Michael McWhertor

The Official FM2 Demo Thread (It's on! Tonight 2AM EST) [Forza Motorsport Forums]