It's a commentary on the booming size of the video game industry in America that a niche game series with a potentially limited audience like Gallop Racer continues to find modest success here. Like its predecessors, Gallop Racer 2003: A New Breed hails from Japan, the land of the wacky simulation, and as the game's title suggests, it focuses on horse racing. We recently got a look at a preview build of Gallop Racer 2003, which is due on store shelves in March, and found that it brings back all the stat-heavy simulation and horse management of the previous games and adds a few minor features to the mix.

　　You'll have to jockey for position to come in first in Gallop Racer 2003's heated races. Gallop Racer 2003 starts off by letting you pick from an assortment of six jockeys. After selecting your character, you can customize his or her appearance to your liking, as long as your choices conform to the dress code of the track. Our jockey's outfit, for instance, ended up being reminiscent of that of Charlie Brown. After your jockey is completed, you'll begin the game's initial tutorial mode, which takes the form of a jockey school. At the beginning of the week, you'll receive a "lecture" on one of several topics, including special horse abilities and how to excel at the start, in the middle, or during the final stretch of a race. Later in the week, after you've absorbed all the information in the lecture (and there's a lot of it), you'll get to practice what you've learned in a scenario tailored toward that topic. Finally, at the end of the week, you'll take a test on what you've learned. Gallop Racer 2003's tutorial mode is pretty extensive, and it definitely helps get you up to speed in what is, overall, a rather complicated game.

　　The main mode of play in Gallop Racer 2003 is the season mode. This is where you negotiate to obtain new horses, enter them in races, and generally try to make a name for yourself, win prize money, and build up your collection of available horses. After you have a few steeds in your stable, you can enter them in upcoming races and then hit the track to prove your mettle as a jockey. When you race, you take an active part in controlling your horse as you thunder toward the finish line. Winning a race is much more complicated and involved than steering your horse and hitting an "accelerate" button, however. The basic controls allow you to hit up and down to set the horse's speed and left and right to steer back and forth, but the catch is that you have to pay close attention to factors like the horse's mood, stamina, and preference for position in the pack. If you push your horse too hard or otherwise make him unhappy, he'll become fatigued or stubborn and you'll lose speed very quickly. One wrong move can take you from the head of the pack to dead last in a matter of seconds. You can also whip the horse with a riding crop to motivate it, but again, if you're too hard on your mount he'll turn on you, causing you to quickly lose the race. As time progresses and you become a more skilled jockey, you'll build up more money from winning races, which you can use to obtain more horses.

　　Statistics also play a big part in determining the outcome of your races. Gallop Racer 2003 features a lot of peripheral activities aside from the main racing game. For one, this year's edition of the game features a new and improved betting system that you can take advantage of before a race. This mode gives you a bunch of different things to bet on, like whether or not you'll win or what place you'll attain at the end of the race. Another feature that series fans will be familiar with is the breeding mode. After you've retired a stud and a mare, you can go to the breeding mode in April and literally combine them to produce a foal. Gallop Racer 2003 also adds a few minigames to the breeding mode that allow you to enhance the stats of the foals that you produce.

　　Gallop Racer 2003 is mostly a "more of the same" improvement on the previous games in the series. The graphics and sounds really haven't been improved much since the previous game, but then, the focus of a sim game like this isn't really on the graphics anyway. The new game does have a whopping 3,000 horses to obtain and 30 new tracks to race on, which will give fans of the series a whole lot more to do. The new and comprehensive tutorial mode is a significant addition that should help new players ease into the game. If you're wary of dealing with lots of numbers, Gallop Racer isn't really your game, as the horses, your jockey, the tracks, and all the other facets of the gameplay are rife with stats. Fans of simulation games involving management, number tracking, and attention to detail should find Gallop Racer 2003 to be an excellent addition to their libraries. The game will be available in select stores and for a limited time toward the end of March, so interested gamers should make sure to secure a copy soon.