You've heard your name a million times. You mother used it when you were a baby. Kids on the playground used it. Your first love used it. Your coworkers use it. Your boss uses it. You've heard it in anger and disgust and delight. It has been shot through with subtext and significance. So you know when you tell a salesman your name and he uses it a few times too many? You know how it has none of those qualities? You know how it acquires a grating insincerity?

Welcome to Dirt 2, in which you choose your name from a long list as soon as you start playing. Then, the long hours spent by celebrity rally racers in the voiceover studio come into play. Hey Tom, that last race was a tough one. Hey Tom, you've unlocked some awesome new liveries. Hey Tom, you're in first place. Hey Tom, give me some space over here. Hey Tom, you're pretty far back there. Hey Tom, you've unlocked China. Hey Tom, you're great. Hey Tom, I'm your buddy. Hey Tom, you remember when we first met, 50 races ago? Hey Tom, that was awesome. Hey Tom, you're a legend. Hey Tom, you're the top. Hey Tom, you're a Bendel bonnet. Hey Tom, hey Tom, hey Tom, hey Tom. It's like a thousand Navis from a thousand Zelda games reminding me something a thousand times.

By the way, here's my favorite. "Hey, Tom. I'm always surprised by Morocco. It's such a cool country." Why would Travis or Ken or Tanner or whichever X-Games celebrity recorded that line be surprised by Morocco? Has anyone ever not thought it was a cool country? You can't get any better PR than the movie "Casablanca."

Scrubbing away the Dirt

I probably shouldn't gripe so much about Dirt 2's annoying presentation. Codemasters just wants to sell more copies. You can't really blame it. After years of making dignified racing games and seeing its sales dwarfed by whatever game is pandering to some car-culture demographic, Codemasters has decided to EA-ify its front end. Dirt's clean interface has been scrapped in favor of X-Games event porn. Instead of moving through menus, you move around your trailer. You go outside with the crowd milling about and the location-specific skybox looming in the background behind the banners. Everything is 3-D. Even the piece of paper detailing the current online tournament is a 3-D object you can view from different angles by fussing with the analog stick. Your beautiful car, shoved off to one side, is all but lost in the visual noise. Licensed music from B-list alt-rock bands blares in the background. Listen closely for a precious few B-side tracks from A-list alt-rock bands. A low-rent DJ Atomica does schtick between songs. "I'm pitching a tent, that song was so good," he declares. And Travis and Katie and Tanner talk to you constantly. They are little celebrity ghosts murmuring in your ear, or maybe toadies in your entourage. Hey Tom, hey Tom, hey Tom. Their chatter during the races approximates the experience of an online race over Xbox Live. So, Katie, where you from?

You get constant rewards, many of them meaningless, all of them slamming into the game with the force of an orbital drop. Money? Bah. Liveries? Please. Doo-dads to dangle from the rearview mirror? You'll never play from the cockpit view, so why bother? Your levels thud onto the screen, rattling the game world with their impact. 18! 19! 20! 21! It's all so gratuitously EA and hip and edgy and Gen-X-Games. Will anyone notice the laptop in your trailer, right behind the big map where you pick your next race? The original Dirt interface is running on the laptop, clean and smooth and elegant, without an ounce of fat, and completely out of reach.

When the rubber leaves the road

But the ultimate beauty of Dirt 2 is that all this falls away as soon as a race starts (yes, you can turn off the driver chatter). And that's what you're here for. The racing. If Codemasters has to EA-ify the presentation to sell copies, it can have at it so long as it doesn't mess with the racing. And it doesn't. It's as good as it was in Dirt. Better, given the graphics engine, the wonderful courses and some of the new race modes.

Like in the previous games, you're working your way up layers of more and more difficult races. There are basic rallies, and then there are some nifty gimmicks like the Gate Crasher events that teach you to drive a line. There are the wild and woolly stadium races crammed into a tiny area where the track folds in on itself. There are the grand expansive raids with branching, interwoven paths. There are trucks and buggies and rally cars. It all starts out easy enough, but then you get to the Pro and All-Star tiers that boost the speed level.

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Although the tiers get harder, as you drive, you can set the difficulty level however you want. For the casual set to whom the EA-ified presentation appeals, this will probably be a boon. But to those of us who don't mind having to develop a little skill, it's disappointing that Dirt 2 doesn't encourage a challenge. For instance, there's no incentive to drive with the full damage model (forgiving as it is), or to use manual transmission (would some game please reward me for this?), or to race from the cockpit view (which is particularly disappointing, considering all the lovely work that went into the interior views). The developer's last game, GRID, included in-game incentives for all these things. Dirt 2 does no such thing. If you want to race at the easiest level all the way through the game, Dirt 2 couldn't care less.

A new mission system is drawn from Call of Duty 4. It tracks stats like how far you've driven, how many times you've rolled your car, the number of opponents you've overtaken, and so forth. At certain thresholds, you unlock an experience-point bonus. It's a superficial ploy, but it's effective. It ensures that you get some sort of reward even when you fail a race. And it's a way to make your stats matter, rather than just shoving them onto a separate page most people will ignore. But that's in there, too.

Scenic route

In most racing games, the cars are the lead characters. But that's not so much the case with Dirt 2, where the cars are fine, but they're upstaged by the courses. Thanks partly to the phenomenal graphics engine and partly to the fantastic design work, these courses are full of personality. The pipeline and Greek Orthodox church in Croatia, the towns along the spillway in Baja, the close streets in Morocco, the idyllic Chinese countryside, and Utah's majestic canyons are lovely and memorable. And it helps that your co-driver often uses landmarks as reference points, which is a subtle way of saying, "Check out these sweet details." In fact, once you get into the closed streets of Japan and the stadium in Los Angeles, it's a bit anticlimactic. Dirt 2 is at its best in the countryside. Once it's caged and presented to an assembled audience, it loses a lot of its wild charm.

The driving itself is a delight. A good rally racing game distinguishes itself by splitting the difference between chaos and control. You can't count on your tires constantly biting into asphalt. Dirt and mud throw no small amount of uncertainty into your driving. Bumps and jumps will leave you at the mercy of momentum, gravity, impact or some combination thereof. Rally racing is about flirting with the edge of control. This is where the rewind feature really comes into its own. Codemasters introduced this feature in GRID. If you messed up a turn, or misjudged your speed, or fumbled an attempted overtake, you could press a button, rewind the game, and try again, ? la the Prince of Persia in Sands of Time. This added a lot to a game about precision racing without your necessarily having to be precise all the time. It adds even more to a rally racing game where you're always on the verge of losing control. There's nothing quite so satisfying as slightly underestimating how much you're going to slide, failing spectacularly, rewinding, and then absolutely nailing it. Ken Block has spent a lifetime practicing this kind of driving. You're just a dilettante, so it's only fitting you should get Mulligans. Because when you nail it, you're just as good as Ken Block.

There have been some wonderful racing games lately, pulling out all the stops to best capture various types of driving. GRID for precision racing, Midnight Club: Los Angeles for crowded city racing and Wipeout HD with the Fury add-on for slick sci-fi combat racing. These are all top-notch games and the very best in their subgenres. And now that Dirt 2 is out, arcade-ish rally racing gets its nonpareil, even if you do have to run a gauntlet of annoying presentation to get behind the wheel.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.