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Sometimes you find a gem. Browsing through the Steam-store (an online shop where you buy PC games as downloads) I stumbled upon an ad for TrackMania United, which they were selling at half price for a limited time. It looked semi-interesting, and when I found out you can download a free light-version of the game I was sold. The TrackMania Nations is not a demo, but a fully playable, non-restricted game. I downloaded it, installed and played it. I liked it. I sent the file to my brother Jens, he installed it and we played. For hours. Then we bought the “full” game, and played. For hours.

The Game
TrackMania is a racing game. You race on imaginative tracks with bends, turns, jumps, hills, pillars, tricks, traps and loops. The game comes with twohundred-and-some tracks and a simple-to-use track editor – so an unmeasurable amount of home-made tracks. And it's all about time. How fast can you get from the start to the finish?

What sets this game apart from other racing games is that your opponents are only ghosts on the track. No bumping, no overtaking, no streamlining. This has the very positive effect that your races aren't destroyed by sudden lag on the server. This was what got on my nerves the most when playing for example the otherwise excellent TOCA Race Driver 3 online. You're driving perfectly fine, then a sudden lag and you have an opponent halfway through your passenger's seat and you're flung off track in high speed, destroying your race. Sure, you play TrackMania online, and you can see where the opponents are (if you so choose) but your race against the clock is the only thing that matters.

How it's played
Most tracks are short, between fifteen and thirty seconds, so competing on that scale means it's all about hundredth of a second. Where can I shave off another tenth of a second, how can I take that one tight turn a hundreth of a second faster? On the most popular game mode, Time Attack, you have a pre-set amount of time, say five minutes to perform as fast a track-time as you can. At any point you can hit delete, and start again instantly from start – so if you blow the first corner, you don't have to finish a lap you know won't improve your time. It's all about getting that one, perfect time.

Another mode, Rounds means all participants start at the same time and do a single attempt – no restarts. Fastest time gets a certain amount of points, usually 10 and following cars a decreasing amount. All cars who finish the race within usually 10 seconds after the winner will score one point. First car to a pre-set victory condition (usually 30 points) win the race. There are other modes, like Laps and Teams – but I haven't tried them out yet. I'm having too much fun with the first two, which are the two most popular online.

Driving is outrageously simple. Throttle, brake, left and right turns. Nothing else. No handbrake, no turbos. The trick is hitting every turn perfectly, sweeping every apex at absolutely the maximum speed that turn can be taken in successfully. Every player online is ranked using a system of LP (Ladder Points) – right now I'm ranked about 300 000th in the world, with 4.8 million registered users according to the website.

What Does it Bring
…besides one kick-a**-game? The game comes with a track-editor and car-paint-editor. Yes, you can paint your car anyway you like. Add stickers, write stuff on them, and paint them in all the colors of the rainbow. You need the bought game to actually upload them and have them when playing online so that others can see them as well. It also had a setting I found strangly interesting. “3D glasses“. Yes, by enabling 3D-glasses mode, the red and green channels are horisontally separated, so using 3D-glasses (the kind you used to get with the Donald Duck-magazine in the days of yore) you could see the game in 3D.

Well, I couldn't not very well not try that out, now could I!? I found a cheap set online that wasn't made out of cardboard and bought them. And yes, in case you are wondering, I am insane. The 3D-effect is cool, but not useful. Just what I expected. The 3D-effect is at times very believable – but with the colored glasses all colors are distorted, and because the color channels are separated – everything is naturally a bit blurry. And with a game demanding absolute precision, blurry is bad m'kay.

So if you are a perfectionist who likes to really try to get a track to go perfectly, instead of the Need For Speed-kind of balls-to-the-walls push-the-other-cars out-of-my-way kind of brawler-racer, this might be for you. Or if you like making your own tracks – which in this game is about as easy as building LEGO:s. Give it a shot, it won't cost you anything – just go to trackmania.com and download the completely free Trackmania Nations and give it a go. Then find me (username themosse.net) and let's race!