It's about to be a great time to be a racing fan. When Dirt 2 comes out on September 8, it will ruin other rally racing games for you, as well as its fair share of non-rally racing games. But can a rally racing game satisfy caRPG fans looking for another Forza or Midnight Club: Los Angeles, games that let you collect and customize your cars?

Well, not really. Liveries notwithstanding, that's not quite Dirt 2's agenda. However, it does let you add customizable bits to the in-car view. In an interview with Boomtown, Dirt 2 design manager Ralph Fulton explained.

There's a bunch of them... let me think. Off the top of my head there's two different things: we've got the dashboard objects, we've got a Hula girl, we've got a nodding dog, erm, we've got a dinosaur, we've got a little Ken Block figurine that nods his head, and also they're all hooked up to the physics system which is the cool thing about them. It's one of those things that [one] of our physics programmers basically started working on in his own time because he thought it would be funny, "That's so cool, let's get that in the game." The other little [things] dangle from the rear-view mirror, and again they're hooked up to the physics; as you crash they'll thrash about, and there we've got... on 360, you can have your Xbox avatar which is suspended by his foot from the rear-view mirror, or you can have fluffy dice. What else is there... there's a number of other things you can have dangling so just a little bit of personalisation that you can put in there.