THIS MONTH I'VE MOSTLY BEEN PLAYING
Date: November 2008
Game: Trackmania (DS)
Reason: because dammit, there has to be
a good DS racing game out there somewhere.

Racing games are the DS’ Achilles heel. Since an excellent but unadorned port of Ridge Racer 64 four years ago and a decent enough iteration of Mario Kart a year later, the system has been noticeably lacking in what’s arguably modern gaming’s most popular genre. Yet there’s no inherent reason for it – RRDS shows that the machine is capable of moving big, detailed scenery around at breathtaking pace (by the later stages it’s terrifyingly fast) and can fit lots of tracks onto even a small cart (at just 32MB, Ridge DS is only one-eighth of the size of the DS’ biggest ROMs), and digital controls didn’t stop games like the original Ridge Racer, Daytona USA and Sega Rally being massive hits in the PS/Saturn era. So where are the great post-2005 DS racers? And surely there must have been at least ONE good one in the whole of 2008, the DS’s biggest year to date?

Good luck figuring out where to go next.

Trackmania DS certainly isn’t it. Since your reporter’s valued friend and colleague J Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun came back breathless with excitement in the summer after visiting developers Firebrand for a preview, it’s looked as if the handheld version of the hugely popular PC series might be the game to finally wave the (chequered) flag for the DS in the world of racing. And when it finally appeared this month, first impressions were pretty encouraging – TMDS has a splendid engine that carries the high-speed action along more smoothly than a greased hovercraft on a Teflon ice-rink, even during the incredibly fleeting moments when there are more than two cars on the screen at once. (Possibly because it isn’t wasting any CPU time on bothersome collision detection – TMDS is a time-trial game, and your “opponents” are ghosts who exist only to provide a visual cue for how close you are to the target pace. In fact they just get in the way visually, and there’s no point in ever choosing to have more than the one whose medal time you’re trying to achieve displayed. Oddly, you can’t race against a ghost of your own previous lap time.)

But like the same developer’s DS version of GRID from a couple of months before (see below), Trackmania is a case of a great engine wrapped around some really poor game design. Despite being capable of pretty stunning draw distances, it spends most of its time lazily cheating you with blind corners and jumps, giving you no possible way of working out where you’re supposed to be going until it’s too late. The gameplay, then, chiefly consists of speeding down the track until you fall foul of some hidden obstacle or pitfall, then immediately restarting, remembering where it was, and repeating the process until you’ve trial-and-errored your way to the end. (It’s no accident that there’s a one-touch “instant restart” button, because otherwise there’d be a nationwide epidemic of smashed DSes.) For those of you old enough to understand the reference, it’s Rick Dangerous Racing.