The first game in the Juiced urban racing game series had a rocky history. Developed by UK based Juiced Games, the title was almost ready to ship by Acclaim before the first incarnation of the publisher went bankrupt in the summer of 2004. THQ picked up the rights to Juiced but then decided to hold off releasing it until summer 2005. The final results were only average but the sales were solid enough for THQ to buy Juiced Games as a new internal developer and commission a sequel. On Thursday at THQ's Gamers Day event FiringSquad got to see a bit of Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights in action (we were not allowed to play the early build which ran on an Xbox 360 dev kit).

The title of the game also reflects a new arrangement between THQ and the custom car touring show Hot Import Nights which can bring in thousands of people to its events to showcase the custom car scene. Juiced 2 uses this setting as a way to introduce you to the game. The first thing you do is make a custom driver character via an avatar system that will allow for tons of changes. After you decided on either a male or female character and make the visual look of him or her to your tastes it's off to the races, litteraly.

Juiced 2 will have tons of customization options right off the bat for your rides and as you win races (and money) more options will become available. The game will have access to over 90 difference licensed vehicles from a variety of car makers but that's just the tip of the iceburg as you will also have the chance to customise your ride with over 300 different parts, from front and rear bumbers to hood to spoilers to tires and many others. Gearheads can also modify engines, transmission, turbo and more under the hood and you can even customised the interior of your car with different seats and seat belts. There's also the different kinds of paint jobs you can give which not only gives you options on different colors but also different kinds of paint such as thin, gloss, metallic and others. You can even layer different color paints on your ride which gives it that cool custom car style sheen. And did we mention decal support? Yep you can purchase and place all sorts of stickers and decals on your custom ride and even stretch and size them up to your liking. Over 2,000 decals will be available and you will be able to put down up to 50 of them on your ride.

In order to open up more options to make your ride your own, Juiced 2 puts your ride on the urban streets in circuit and drift races on a variety of tracks. Juiced 2 will use real life locations for their races and at the Gamers Day event a couple of the London tracks were shown. Circuit races, of course, make you finish the race ahead of your AI competitors while drift races make you use the car's drift capabilities to move around the tracks, racking up points along the way. If you have the guts you can even put your entire car up against opponants. Win the race and you take your rival's ride. Lose the race and...well, you get the picture.

The game also has something tha Juiced Games's represenatives called "driver DNA". Basically Juiced 2 tracks how well you drive in the single player potion of the game and stores it as a kind of player profile. This comes in handy in the game's online modes where you can put your DNA profile up and let other race against your "ghost" in offline mode with your driver DNA approximating how well you might do in an actual race. Of course you can also download the profiles of other racers as well. This is all a part of the game's plans for online modes which will include racing in circuit and drift races along with the previously mentioned gambling events.

The Gamers Day build of Juiced 2 is still early but based on what we saw the game looks really good already with detailed car models and authentic looking cityscapes for the tracks. One of the most impressive things about the game is the damage model for the cars which makes them crumble up and lose pieces realistically (the damage models doesn't affect how the cars drive). The demo ran on an Xbox 360 dev kit but you can expect similar visuals for the PS3 version of the game. Versions for the PC, PS2, PSP and even the Nintendo DS will ship to stores as well (no Wii version has been announced).

While we didn't get to play the game first hand, the live demo of Juiced 2 shows that Juiced Games has learned some lessons from the original title and plan to make the sequel far more robust in terms of both gameplay and options. It's still several months from completion but we look forward to perhaps getting some hands-on time with Juiced 2 before its release this fall.

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