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Why? Because without cash, you can't buy any of the game's numerous cars, houses, clothes, or upgrades. However, you don't earn nearly as much cash just sticking to the races, so you'll likely be inspired to put up with the monotony of the missions.

Fortunately, the various races and challenges are quite a bit more compelling than these missions. Basically, you're a delivery service no matter how you look at it, and the only variances are in what you're delivering, and occasionally what kind of car you're driving. You'll either find yourself delivering illicit packages for seedy individuals, delivering some of the game's more expensive rides to dealerships and mechanics, delivering hitchhikers to their desired destinations, or delivering high-strung models to their homes after a long day of shopping. The missions are more repetitive, which come in only a few set categories. There's also the time trials, as well as the speed challenges, which task you either with driving a set speed past a number of speed traps laid about a course, or simply reaching a designated speed within a set amount of time. There's a huge roster of them to take part in on various roads that range from hairpin-filled hill climbs to straight-and-narrow city races.

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Races are fairly typical street races, with up to seven opponent drivers and a number of checkpoints scattered throughout a course. It's just too bad there's not more variety to what you end up doing. There's often more than enough races and missions available at any given time, so if you don't feel like driving halfway across the island to see something new, you won't necessarily be hurting for things to do right where you already are. What this does is force you to cruise through just about every nook and cranny of Oahu without being overly pushy about it. But if an icon appears on a road you've never driven on before, you have to drive there to access it. If you happen to have driven through a road where an objective resides, you can simply click on that icon on the map and be instantly transported there. You start out with only a few available mission icons on the huge world map, but as time goes on, you'll see more and more begin to pop up across the entire stretch of the island. The way the game forces you to explore is clever. The objectives themselves don't extend beyond races, time trials, speed challenges, and some basic delivery missions, but there are enough of them to keep you going as you explore the massive island of Oahu. It helps that there is quite a lot to do on the island.

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The lack of a cohesive thread to the missions and races does make Test Drive seem a bit pointless, but after a while, you cease to care and find yourself oddly engaged by this scattershot series of objectives. While it's not shocking that a racing game wouldn't have a major, in-depth storyline, the way the game introduces itself and the open-ended nature of the game world give you the impression that there might be some kind of plot to tie everything you do together. That's about all there is to the premise. You start by picking a basic character model to represent yourself, and you're whisked away to fabulous Hawaii to buy a car and a house, do a lot of random racing, and drive hitchhikers and models around the island for some reason. If nothing else, Test Drive Unlimited is a nice change of pace from the typical batches of cheesy street racers and hardcore driving sims. It's a little rougher around the edges than its 360 counterpart, but if you never played the 360 version and think the idea of racing around Hawaii while bumping up against other online players sounds like fun, this version's worth a look. Now the game has come to the PC, and for all intents and purposes, this version is nearly identical to the 360 game. Not everything the game did on the 360 worked brilliantly, but it was an inventive and unique piece of technology that was impressive in its own right. Purportedly the first 'massively open online racing' game, Unlimited provided you with a wide-open setting (the Hawaiian island of Oahu), a myriad of slick rides, tons of different races to take part in, and an online mode that actually let you occupy the same basic driving space as other online players and challenge them in competition. Late last year, Atari and developer Eden Studios released Test Drive Unlimited for the Xbox 360.

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