Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

First things first. Do not expect a legendary game here. Of course, the game is good but its purpose is to provide plain extertainment at which it succeeds (at least for me). This one introduced me to the virtual world of racing.

Gameplay: Well, its a racing game. So, quite obviously you'll be racing most of the time (in fact all the time). At the start of eaach race, you can select a variety of cars from various classes. The other cars driven by the AI would also belong to the same AI (thats fair). There's a tournament mode as well in which you play all the tracks serially in increasing order of difficulty collecting points at the end of each race (which is always a circuit race); the player with the highest points winning. On winning a tournament, you unlock a special car which you can henceforth use in other races.The best part has to be the splitscreen mode which you can play with a friend offline, It's simply great fun.

Graphics: The cars look good if not excellent. There are four camera modes with one of these offering a view from the driver's pespective (you can see the steering wheel and the other meters in full glory). The circuit textures are blocky but this tends to be ignored as you generally end up racing at insanely high speeds. Also there's a good deal of variety (from the jungles and the circuits to the snow and the beaches).

Sound: The cars sound realistic enough although they could've been better. There's not much happenning elsewhere; the car engines moving and the cars themselves bumping onto each other are the sound producing events.

On the whole it's a fairly good game. A second look at the release date makes it even better. The SE version of the game runs well on Windows XP and is the one you should prefer.