Racing games, they have cars. One of the common themes in racing games is that you spend your race "winnings" on "parts" that make your car go marginally faster. When Need for Speed Underground came out, one could add Body kits and Stickers and other doo-dads to turn one's auto from stock to a 4 wheeled rolling monstrosity of fiberglass and steel.

Now, any racing game worth it's salt is doing car customization. Don't want your Ferrari to be red? Make it hot pink and add some tribal vinyls. Got a mid 90's Japanese import? Slap a body kit and add some rims! You're gold!

The greatest part about this added feature is that your car no longer became just another car in the game, it became your car. You picked the kit, the paint, the stickers, the window tint, everything. And then you got to hoon it around a virtual track, classy.

Good Idea: Forza 2

Forza 2 lets you pick from a few body kits, but the selections are modeled from real world parts and not some made up parts the game modelers dreamed up. These body parts are enough to make the cars look different from stock, but not so extravagant that they become tacky. But body kits are a small part of the customization options, the real meat and potatoes of it are in the paint and vinyls feature. While games prior to Forza 2 have had a similar vinyl app where the player takes simple shapes and vector images to create images, Forza 2 seemed to have spawned off a whole sub-community of artists who take it to a whole new level. Photo-realism is possible, even if it takes 500 hundred layers. It took me a visit to the Forza 2 forums to realize that the images were not, in fact, imported from a PC and stuck into the game somehow.

Bad Idea: Need For Speed Underground 2, Carbon.

Let's be honest: the minute Fast and Furious came out, tacky import cars suddenly became "In" and the first game to capitalize on this was Need For Speed Underground. That first game was great. But then the 2nd game came out, and all of a sudden in order to advance you had to tack awful body kits and spinning rims to your car in order to get a big enough "Visual Score" to advance to the next stage. Adding to the stupidity was the ability to "Race" SUVs (which, in retrospect, provided emission-free thrills. Driving a H2 with a spoiler and nitrous oxide over 150 MPH feels strangely patriotic)

The stupid didn't stop there. Need For Speed Most Wanted managed to redeem itself by tying your car's appearance to it's wanted level, which meant that once in a while you just swapped the paint job and stickers so the cops wouldn't notice. (And it had police chases, which were very fun)

Carbon, that game just kind of tanked.

I mean, at this point the series introduced "Auto sculpt" which let you take an already stupid-looking body kit/rims/spoiler and make it look worse. The series was still stuck in it's "2 Fast 2 Furious" mindset, where regular people would race cars to settle territory disputes.

But the cars, oh my God, what were they thinking?

at one point I think I was able to add a body kit to a SLR McLaren, paint it hot pink, add a wing the size of a park bench to the rear, and drive it around. At some point the fantasy is just too ridiculous to be amusing anymore. I left my cars stock in defiance.

Part of the problem is that, silly me, I just wanted RACING STRIPES. but NO! I get 100's of tribal stickers instead! And some other ugly stickers that I could win but I have to "Unlock" and by the time I've raced 50 people in order to unlock it, I've settled on the setup I have. Just leave all of them unlocked, really.

Also, there are stickers for part and auto manufacturers in a lot of games, and I add them to make my car have that "Race" look (or whatever) but often they have some benign value like 50 credits each. and it's just annoying, because I want to add as many as I want, but they cost half as much as a regular vinyl but cover 1/16 the area. Just give them away for free, like every other manufacturer does, free advertising, etc. (hell, what racing game isn't just filled with ads? eh?)

See, the point of customizing a car in the game is that one feels compelled to do so, to make the car look better than stock and improve the overall experience. But when the cars start to look better stock than they do when they're tricked out, it's just pointless.