I liked Juiced a lot. It had a number of flaws, but was a surprisingly original game, considering the genre. Pretty much the first game to feature team racing (later copied by a bunch of others), including basically a manage only mode which I thought was a lot of fun (basically like B-spec mode in GT4, only you had to manage the AI's stress level while racing and tell them when to pass and such, which could be hectic if you had 3 drivers).
I also really liked how you could set up custom races that counted. Using a bunch of different criteria (track, car make, car region, class, etc). And how the AI drivers had personalities and taunted you. And how it used a class system to make the lower end cars still viable for most of the game, at least for some races. And absolutely fantastic car selection - pretty much every non-exotic car you'd want. And you could have 60 of them, which was nice.
Really nice paint system as well. Sure, it wasn't pixel by pixel like in TXR3, but you could pretty much pick any color you wanted, including some really nice metallic and pearlescent effects (at least on the Xbox and PC) that really looked nice. Much better than in any other game.
The driving model kinda sucked. As did the car customization (other than the paint job). And the track selection could have been better. And they needed to handle muscle cars separately, since they used realistic gearing for them (which meant they only had 4 gears and a low top speed, yet tons of horsepower which made them lower class cars).
Still, overall, a very underrated game. Much better than the NFS games EA keeps cranking out. It did sell pretty well, so a sequel was pretty much inevitable. I just hope they don't dumb it down, but keep the team racing and expand on it.
(Anyway, Juiced was mentioned in the original post, so it is sorta on topic)
