Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)

There's a blissful nirvana strategy gamers yearn for, even though experiencing it usually involves a considerable loss of sleep along with a steep drop in productivity for days on end. Sins of a Solar Empire is one of those rare games that can deliver an incredibly addictive experience that devours a healthy chunk of your life, and you won't mind a bit. Not bad for a debut game from a relatively small developer. Ironclad and publisher Stardock should be proud, because they've delivered one of the most original, compelling strategy games in recent years.

Let's get this clear: Sins isn't anything like a typical turn-based space strategy game such as Galactic Civilizations or the granddaddy of the genre, Master of Orion. Instead, this is a real-time game--but don't let that make you think that it's Command & Conquer in space. Though it's in real time, Sins unfolds at such a leisurely pace and can happen on such a gigantic scale that you'll easily manage five or six gigantic fleets at a time as you battle across multiple star systems that contain dozens of worlds.

The game is set in a distant future where the Trader Emergency Coalition--an alliance of various human worlds--bands together in the face of two threats. The first is the Advent, an offshoot of humanity that has embraced an alien philosophy and has come looking to spread the word by force. Even direr is the Vasari, a mysterious alien race that seeks the annihilation of both factions. Sins lets you play from the perspective of any of the three factions, which are approximate mirrors of one another.

Like many space strategy games, the action begins with you in control of a single planet, and from there you must explore the rest of the system worlds, locating planets to colonize, as well as resources that you can exploit to fuel your research and ship-building needs. Sins isn't as ambitious as other space strategy games that task you with taking over a galaxy; instead, the action is limited to a maximum of five local stars, each with a network of planets around it. Travel among planets is limited via strict space lanes, so some planets are natural choke points. Planets themselves come in four varieties. Terran and desert planets can be colonized easily, but to settle ice and volcano planets you must research the appropriate technology first. Asteroids can also be colonized, but they're so small that they can support only tiny populations, making them ideal for outposts.

To support your expansion, you'll have to build a plethora of vessels. Scouts explore the planetary systems, locating ideal worlds to colonize with colony ships, as well as providing advance warning on incoming enemy fleets. Warships come in three classes. The smallest are frigates, and they include frontline combatants, siege vessels that can pummel planets with nuclear weapons, and missile platforms. Then there are larger cruiser-class vessels, such as escort carriers that can deploy squadrons of fighters and bombers to heavier warships. The crème de la crème, though, are the capital ships, which you can build only a handful of. Capital ships are huge, expensive, and powerful, but they're also like the characters in a role-playing game in that they can level up as they gain experience, making them more powerful and unlocking unique and potent abilities. The ability to gain experience creates a powerful dynamic, as you want to get your capital ships into fights so they can level up, but you also want to protect them from danger, because the loss of them can be devastating. However, if you get a task force of high-level capital ships and smaller vessels together, you'll have a force to be reckoned with.

Good strategy games force you to constantly make decisions about where to allocate your resources, and Sins does an exceptional job of this, mainly because you'll usually find yourself having to juggle where to invest your precious resources. There are three resources in the game: money, metal, and crystal. Money is generated by having large planetary populations or by building trade stations. Metal and crystal can only be harvested on small asteroids. Building warships or structures, making planetary improvements, and conducting research consumes large amounts of these resources, and usually you'll have a shortage of at least one of them, which forces you to make some difficult decisions.

It's also possible to engage in a bit of diplomacy, though Sins takes a different tack than a lot of other strategy games. You can do the standard diplomatic maneuvers like declaring a nonaggression pact or forming an alliance with someone, but to do so, you've got to prove your worth to that faction by pursuing missions it puts toward you. For example, one faction might task you with destroying a certain number of defensive structures of another faction. Successfully completing the mission will earn you favor, though not completing the mission will earn disfavor. In order to form an alliance with any faction, you'll have to complete several missions for it.

Then there's the pirate system, which is a brilliant way of waging war by proxy. The pirates are third-party raiders who launch attacks periodically. You can influence whom they attack by raising the bounty on one of your opponent's heads. However, this creates an eBay-like bidding war, where factions are trying to either get the bounties off of their heads or put them on opponents they really need attacked. The danger is that when you bid, you actually put money into the pot that you can't withdraw, even if you lose. That means that if you get into an astronomical bidding war and win, the bad news is that in the next round, the opponent already has a mountain of money in the auction that you have to overcome. The other danger is that the more money there is in the bidding, the bigger the pirate attack will be. It's a pretty slick system, though its one flaw is that it requires you to babysit each auction when it happens, a process that takes a minute or two. Given that attacks happen every 10 or 15 minutes, this is an activity that takes away from the overall pace of the game.

All of this sounds like it might be a handful to handle in real time, but Sins unfolds at a stately, almost leisurely, pace. The action is fast enough that you're constantly busy making decisions, but it's rarely frenetic to the point where you're overwhelmed. To help you manage a huge empire, there's an innovative empire tree on the side of the screen that gives you an outline of all of your planets, fleets, and factories. Let's say you have a fleet battling in a distant system and taking losses. Without zooming away from the battle, you can select a nearby shipyard and start ordering up replacement ships that can automatically join the fleet. With the empire tree, it's relatively easy to manage multiple fleets consisting of dozens of warships each.

If Sins has a downside, it's that larger-scale games will easily take hours upon hours to resolve. Medium-size maps will chew up six to eight hours, often to the point where you will be looking at the clock and wondering just how effective you're going to be the next day on about three or four hours of sleep. Larger games can take even longer at the default speed settings. Things would end a lot faster if there were alternate victory conditions or if the artificial intelligence would surrender after it clearly has no chance of winning. Instead, you have to pulverize each enemy position before the game ends, a process that can take a while. One thing that you can do while you're finishing someone off, though, is to work on accomplishing achievements. The game has its own achievement system that rewards you for remarkable performance, such as wiping out a certain number of enemy capital ships or settling a pirate base. One dastardly achievement challenges you to win without researching a single military technology.

The game features random maps and scenarios, but one thing that's missing is a campaign. Still, Sins of a Solar Empire is an excellent single-player game and one that translates well into the multiplayer realm, especially since it's a lot harder to beat a human opponent than it is a machine. The built-in server browser connects to Ironclad Online, where it's easy to create a multiplayer game or join up with others. The one thing to keep in mind is that, for the sake of brevity, it's usually best to go with small maps in order for the game to resolve in one sitting. Though it's possible to save a multiplayer game, it will take a considerable amount of dedication and scheduling by all parties involved to tackle a huge game.

Finally, the game's visual presentation is excellent. It's not a graphically flashy game, but it works on many levels. The ship designs look cool up close, and watching fleets slug it out is always fun. Pull the camera back, and ships and squadrons are replaced by distinctive icons, giving you the big picture even when you've zoomed out and are looking at a solar system as a whole. The interface is also quite elegant, and it scales nicely to a wide variety of display sizes. The audio and sound effects aren't quite as distinctive, and the music provides some decent sonic wallpaper.

In sum, Sins of a Solar Empire is an absolute must-have if you enjoy strategy games. It's an addictive, deep game that elevates space strategy to new levels. At the same time, it provides a fresh, original take on one of the oldest and most revered subgenres in all of strategy gaming.

No More Heroes (Wii)

In the bizarre California metropolis of Santa Destroy, your trainer encourages you to get naked for your workout, and hired goons bemoan the loss of their spleen when cleaved in two. If you've played any of director SUDA-51's previous games, especially 2005's Killer 7, this kind of irreverent and ironic humor won't come as a shock. What may surprise you, however, is that while No More Heroes brandishes a similarly high-concept story as its love-it-or-hate-it forebear, it features plenty of rewarding, visceral action to complement the intrigue. The eccentricities guarantee that you've never played a game quite like this before--but it's the exciting, blood-spewing combat that will keep you constantly enthralled.

If you need further proof of this game's nuttiness, consider the story. As Travis Touchdown--an action-figure owning, porn-collecting, card-collecting obsessive--you find yourself caught up in the melodrama of a real-life assassination leaderboard. Armed with your trusty beam katana (obviously meant to approximate a Star Wars lightsaber), you slice your way through a dozen killers in your quest to earn the number one rank. Narrowing things down to such a simple description doesn't really do the narrative justice, though, since the absurdity of the premise permeates every aspect of the game--its characters, its references, even its gameplay. The sexy, sophisticated Sylvia taunts Travis with her French accent and feminine curves over and over, only to leave him high and dry; boss characters sing lounge music in baseball fields and attack you with killer shopping carts and prosthetic legs; and you earn side money by mowing lawns and filling gas tanks at the local service station. It's pure insanity, but you won't be able to avert your eyes.

No More Heroes' combat is its shining star, and not enough can be said about its over-the-top, cheerful violence. Armed with your weapon of choice (you can upgrade your katana or purchase new ones, provided you earn enough coinage), you'll take on a decent number of mercenaries on any given mission. You'd think that since you're brandishing a lightsaber, the game would force you to swing the Wii Remote to approximate the experience. Instead, basic combat is on the simple side: You swing your weapon using the A button, and perform hand-to-hand moves using the B button. Remote-waggling is reserved for finishing moves, but it's important to note that every kill is finished with such a move, so there's no shortage of wrist movement here. If you deliver your final blow with your katana, it may be as simple as a flick to the side, while at other times, you can jerk both the Nunchuk and the remote for a theatrical, painful-looking wrestling move. The combination of old-fashioned button-mashing and high-energy yanks and waggles makes for fun, often breathless encounters, and while the same basic movements account for the bulk of the action, it rarely feels repetitive.

Much of this has to do with the exuberance of No More Heroes' brutality. Each enemy spurts seemingly endless showers of blood and coins, so expect to see your screen filled with red streams and golden glitter when you manage a sideswipe through multiple foes at once. It's quite cartoonish, actually: Everything kicks into subtle slow motion when you divide a foe in two, a ring of stars rotates above a stunned enemy's head to the sound of bird chirps, and a small slot machine spins at the bottom of the screen after every finishing move. It's not just for show, though--earn a triple match, and you activate one of your darkside powers. In one case, the entire screen goes gray, and a single button press allows you to attack each foe, one at a time, with a spectacular, stylish thrust. In another, your foes slow to a crawl, allowing you to carve them up with greater ease. These temporary power-ups are awesome to watch and an exhilarating reward for successful combat maneuvers.

There are some subtleties to the combat. When you are locked onto an enemy, you can block attacks and deflect bullets, and use the control pad to dodge. You'll take a higher or lower stance depending on how you hold the remote, may need to stun enemies with a kick before you can damage them, and in some cases, have to defeat them by using alternative means. For example, in several side missions, baseball players clad in Warriors uniforms pitch baseballs at you, and you have to bat them through an entire row to defeat them. You also need to pay attention to how much electricity your katana has, as well as your own health. You can find power-ups to fully recharge your saber, though you can also charge it up by holding the 1 button and shaking the remote up and down (which also results in a pretty lewd-looking act onscreen--and in real life, for that matter). You'll find plenty of health chests scattered about when needed, though apart from boss fights, you'll rarely need them: As fun as the combat is, you won't often find yourself teetering on the verge of death.

The crux of the action is found in No More Heroes' numerous and impressive boss encounters, where you'll use these subtleties to your advantage, though they don't usually present a foreboding challenge until the final few fights. Yet they're still enormously entertaining, thanks to your opponents' melodramatic (and often hysterical) soliloquizing, interesting attacks, and pure wackiness. Holly Summers launches missiles at you from her fake leg, while Stage magician Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii locks you up in the box used for his disappearing act--an attack that kills you instantly if your Nunchuk-flailing skills aren't up to par. Bad karaoke, thinly veiled Star Wars references, and killer hand buzzers are among the many highlights, and just when you think that things couldn't get any stranger--well--you're forced to reevaluate.

When you aren't fighting, you can roam about Santa Destroy on your motorcycle in a free-roaming, Grand Theft Auto-inspired manner. You shouldn't expect the kind of spirited freedom a GTA title provides, though. While there are some traffic and pedestrians, the city is really your key to moving from one mission to the next, and doesn't reward you with any meaningful surprises. That isn't to say there isn't anything to do outside of combat, though. In fact, to stay in top form, you'll need to go out on the town. There, you can make some purely cosmetic purchases, such as some new T-shirts or a spiffy new jacket, though your money is better spent on more impactful upgrades. A trip to the gym, presided over by the creepy Thunder Ryu, will reward you with a few minigames and a stronger body. You can purchase new katanas and upgrades from Doctor Naomi, or videotapes that teach you new wrestling moves from the local rental shop. Once you're done shopping, you can perform more side missions, or head back to your apartment where you can pet your cat, save your game by sitting on the toilet, or try on your new clothes.

The mission structure isn't as fully fleshed out as it could have been. Generally speaking, after each boss fight, you unlock only two new missions, and while you can revisit any mission as many times as you want, many of them are identical, so you may wish for a little more variety--especially when most enemies you face in a mission are the same. Still, there is plenty of diversity to be found. For example, in some missions you may need to slay every enemy without taking a single hit, while others may occur entirely in dark mode, or may allow you to only use wrestling moves. The crazy side jobs that you need to take before unlocking new missions are also nutty enough to keep you fascinated. You'll deliver coconuts that apparently weigh a hundred pounds, wash graffiti off of walls, and scour the beach for hidden mines. They're simple tasks, to be sure, but they use the motion controls well and are just crazy enough to make you wonder what weird job you'll be taking the next time around.

In keeping with the stylish combat and crazy dialogue, No More Heroes' visual design is brimming with strong color choices and benefits from some crisp cel-shading and well-done shadows. Clean textures and exaggerated animations are among the many visual highlights, and some of the kookier boss designs are terrifically insane. There are some graphical issues, however, found mostly in the frame rate, which has a tendency to slow down a bit when you're zooming around on your bike or dicing up a half-dozen foes at once. Nor is the game a technical powerhouse, relying on its powerful art design to carry the load and content to leave its edges jagged. In fact, No More Heroes seems keenly aware of its technical shortcomings: Its minimap and health indicator are pixelated by design, and the menus themselves hearken back to the 8-bit days, as if to embrace the game's focus on style over technical prowess.

The sound design is terrific across the board, however. Not only is the off-kilter soundtrack the perfect complement to the ongoing zaniness, but the sound of combat is loud and quirky, down to the bloodcurdling cries of your delimbed opponents and the tinkling flow of coins into your coffers. The remote's speaker is used quite well here, emanating the prototypical groans of your katana to fantastic effect. The speaker is also used to simulate a call on Travis' cell phone, and done so well you will probably hold the remote up to your ear as if it were an actual receiver. The voice acting is pitch-perfect in most cases, down to Sylvia's lugubrious French sarcasm and Travis' immature bloodthirstiness.

A fairly standard play-through will probably net you around 12 hours of gameplay your first time through, though you could blow through it quicker if your goal is simply to get to the end as quickly as possible. But even with the element of surprise removed, the fantastic combat is more than enough reason to revisit No More Heroes. This time, SUDA-51 has delivered a game that can match its absurd premise with equally stimulating gameplay, making for one of the most unique and satisfying action games in recent memory.

Burnout Paradise (Xbox360)

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than "open-world gameplay"? Let's face it, it's kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It's understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise's concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series' crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout's nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns 'N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn't have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you've worked your way through the game's progression of driver's licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you'll still be finding new things you didn't even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you've grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you're initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race--unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout's previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city's various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it's not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn't on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you've done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you've bested the bulk of the game's events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race's starting point. But for the majority of the game, it's not really an issue.

It's a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don't feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to "own" it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you'd expect--you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game's effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you're aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

A number of other elements from previous Burnouts are also missing or altered here. The lack of aftertouch (the mechanic that let you steer your wreck into opponents during races and take them out) is a real bummer, as it makes wrecking during races a pure nuisance rather than an opportunity for more destructive glee. Traffic checking is absent as well, though it isn't sorely missed. The racing artificial intelligence has seen a bit of tweaking here and there. You still get the sense of rubber banding that the series has always employed, but as the game goes on and the racers get tougher, your opponents become more aggressive and don't just tank right before the finish line. By and large, the game is actually a bit easier than the last couple of Burnout games, but the challenge toward the later stages of the game definitely ramps up significantly.

The racing itself is as exciting as it's ever been. Standard races are intense and thrilling, road rage events are full of wreckful delights, stunt runs have you jumping, barrel rolling, and flat spinning all over the place, marked man races are tense fights to the finish line as multiple enemy cars bop you around trying to wreck you beyond repair, and burning routes have you taking on challenging time trials to earn new cars. If there's any flaw to be noted with the core game design, it's maybe that there aren't enough event types. There's no shortage of events and random stuff to do, but running the same event types, and even some of the same specific events again and again, can grow a bit tiresome after a while. After each license upgrade, all the events you've raced (except for burning routes) reset, so you end up doing a lot of them over and over again. This wouldn't even be an issue if there were a greater variety of event types, but as it stands, there are only those few, and you may wear out on doing races and marked man events again and again.

If you do get a bit bored with the single-player action, you can always hop online and race against others. Doing so is quite seamless. Simply press right on the D pad to bring up the online menu, and then decide if you want to join up with other existing games or create your own. Online in Burnout Paradise is quite a different animal than that of previous Burnout games. You don't just hop into a lobby menu and pick races to engage in. Instead, the city itself is the lobby, and while the host decides what he wants to unleash upon you, you can just mess around and do whatever you like.

When hosting, you have the ability to both race and take on challenges. Races are of your own design, with you setting the beginning and ending points anywhere in the city. Challenges are set, and there are literally hundreds of them. The trick is that there are a limited number of challenges depending on how many players are in a group. There are 50 challenges for two players, 50 for eight players, and 50 for each denomination in between. This means that once you've exhausted all the challenges for two players, you'll have to get three, then four, and so on and so on if you want to complete them all. That might prove unwieldy for those who don't have a lot of friends online to play the game, but at least the challenges themselves are creative and fun. The challenges range from competitive bouts of drifting, crashing, and jumping to cooperative versions of all the same stuff. It's an inventive mode to be sure and an exceptionally fun one when you've got a good crew of friends to play with.

It also bears mention that while online, you can use the PlayStation Eye or Xbox Live Vision Camera to take shots of your rivals online. When you take down a rival player that has a camera hooked up, the cam will take a mugshot of that player's reaction. It's kind of a neat feature that, unfortunately, will probably be abused by all manner of nudity over the course of the game's lifespan, but that's inevitably what happens when you let people do things with cameras.

Paradise's visual presentation is precisely the kind of top-notch work you've come to expect from the series. Once again, the game sets a standard for how a sense of speed should feel in an arcade racer. This game is lightning fast, and the frame rate in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game holds up regardless of the chaos onscreen. The car crashes in this game are absolutely fantastic, thanks to some dynamite particle effects and camera work in each and every mangled wreck. Cars deform to wonderful effect, scrunching up like an accordion in head-on collisions and bending and twisting nicely in other situations. The only thing that continues to look a little weird is the total lack of drivers in all the cars around the city. It's understandable that Criterion would leave out mangled corpses or what have you for the sake of an E 10+ rating, but it still looks strange seeing all these disembodied cars driving around like a society of Turbo Teens.

It's also worth noting that Burnout Paradise is a game that commands an HD display, and not just for full graphical effect. On the standard-definition TVs we tried, we found the minimap to be borderline useless unless we squinted like crazy. On an HD set, the minimap is detailed and blown up enough to rely on, but when playing in standard definition, it simply became a hassle to use.

If you're looking for differences between the two versions, you won't find many. The PlayStation 3 version looks maybe a hair crisper than the 360 version, but that's about the only visual difference to speak of. On the flipside, the 360 version has a slight edge in that you can use custom soundtracks to drown out the miserable collection of songs EA has amassed for the game. There are a few highlights that fit well with the theme of high-energy racing, but the vast bulk of the music consists of irritating modern rock that's about as ill-fitting as humanly possible. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" might, itself, be a car wreck of a song, but it doesn't fit the vibe of the game at all. Add in the collection of original Criterion-produced guitar rock tracks from previous Burnout games that sound like they were culled from Joe Satriani's nightmares, and you have a pretty unpleasant musical experience all around. The annoying radio DJ who pops up now and again to give hints, mock you obnoxiously when you fail, and make one glib comment or another about something going on in the city doesn't help matters. He's merely an annoyance that probably wouldn't even be worth mentioning save for the fact that you cannot turn him off. At least the sound effects are still top-flight in every regard. Crashes thunder, engines roar, and tires screech with terrific clarity all throughout the game. If you've got a surround-speaker setup, it's all the better.

It's entirely possible that some people might not enjoy Burnout Paradise's significant shift in direction, specifically those who simply wanted another incremental Burnout sequel. Indeed, Paradise is anything but incremental, and while it might prove a polarizing experience for some, most will likely appreciate what a radical overhaul this game really is. The open-world design isn't just a lazy gimmick--it's a wonderfully executed concept that doesn't rob the game of the series' most beloved tenet: the act of driving fast and wrecking hard. If you're one of the people who tried the Burnout Paradise demo and formed a rather negative opinion of the game, you're not alone. But if you have any affection for the series, you really owe it to yourself to give the full game a look. The demo did little to truly represent what a superbly fun racer this game can be.