So why detail all this info? For starters, it's nice to know it's there, and if you spend any extended time with the horses, you'll start to learn how all their stats, abilities work together with how you ride them, plus you can mess around with creating your own track type and weather, or horse lineups to simulate the hell out of everything -- seriously, you can pick the horse positions, whether they like the position they're in, their pace, how they perform in the final stretch, where they run on the course and how they hit straights. All of this can be created from scratch using the game's tracks, or you can edit existing seasons' data and see if it changes the outcome.

We were clearly in over our heads in the Simulation Mode, which is why the game mercifully grants you the option of just jumping into Free Mode that have all the above mentioned stuff pre-selected for you. You just pick a pre-existing horse by class, a course and jump right into the races, which was where we spent most of our time at the Tecmo event before we took the game back to the office and started digging into the meat of the game, but more on that in a moment. You still can tweak most of the stuff listed above to your heart's content, but it's not really necessary.

Regardless of what the pre-race options are, the actual races control the same way, and it's far more complicated than we first thought. While still in the starting gates, a meter pops up with two arrows whipping back and forth, if you can line them up with a tap of the Circle button, you'll get a better start and an easier time managing your horse. The arrows determine where you as the rider want the horse to perform and where the horse is actually performing, and keeping the two matched up while balancing pushing the horse through each race is key.

A handy green/yellow/red meter shows you how the horse is handling the pressure and if you're pushing them too hard, while a green stamina bar lets you know how much oomph the horse has left in it. During each race, you're graded on things like pacing, speed out of the gate, the terrain you choose and so on, which net you bonuses or dock you points at the finish. As the race progresses, three squares will randomly cycle three shapes in two different colors; the left side of a circle, a cross, and the right side of the circle. If you can match these up, either by completing a circle, starting one and finishing it with crosses or forming three crosses -- all in the same color -- your horse will hit Revolution Mode and realize he or she is The Equine One, gaining extra speed until the stamina meter runs out.

As we said before, keeping the arrows matched up by tugging or snapping the reins (either a single or double-tap up or down on the d-pad) is key through most of the race to keep the horse's stamina up, but eventually towards the final stretch it'll likely come time to bust out the whip and egg the horse on a little. Even here, your options are varied. You can show the horse the whip by holding Triangle, which encourages them without any physical contact, smack them especially hard with a shoulder whip (Square) or just default the normal whip (Circle) which falls somewhere in the middle on the motivation-to-sting scale. The X button lets you switch sides so you're not smacking the hell out of the poor horse in the same place every time.

These are the default controls, mind you, and there is an option to move the reins to both analog sticks for a better simulation of whipping or tugging on them, but the basic whip controls are the same. If you're really feeling overwhelmed, you can pre-set all the conditions for the race (like where to run on the course, how to handle the stretch, corners and so on) but you'll be stuck using the normal whip all the time. Regardless of how you go about it, beating the horse will seriously damage its calm, and you're likely to get a wild horse, which isn't really too keen on finishing races. That's bad.

Your final finish and how you raced the horse (starting position, position throughout the race, your handling of the course, the final stretch and how compatible the horse and rider were) nets you points, and these points factor into the biggest part of the game: Theme Park Mode, which lets you go nuts controlling every aspect of raising and racing horses.