Sonic Riders

Every board in this game is running on a lung of compressed air, and that single meter explains its whole personality. Boosting spends air. Tight turns spend air. Drift too greedily through a corner and the gauge empties, the board sputters out, and Sonic is left jogging along the tarmac like a man who missed his bus. To refill it you have to work the track: bounce off ramps, hold tricks on the landing, hoover up air rings, tuck into the turbulence trail behind a rival. It is a racing game about resource management disguised as a game about going fast.

Sega and Sonic Team released it in 2006, at the tail of the PS2's life and in the middle of the franchise's least steady decade, and it arrived with the Babylon Rogues in tow — Jet the Hawk and company, built specifically so Sonic would have someone to lose a race to. Story mode splits along those lines and mostly exists to funnel you through the courses. The real design idea is elsewhere, in the track layouts. Each course is cut into three parallel routes gated by character type: Speed grinds rails, Flight rides ring trails through the upper air, Power smashes through obstacles that everyone else has to go around. Pick a racer and you are effectively picking which version of the track you will learn.

It is also, honestly, a difficult game to like on first contact. The handling asks for a precision the controls do not always volunteer, the AI rubber-bands without shame, and the tutorial does a poor job of explaining that conserving air matters more than winning the first corner. Plenty of players bounced off it in a weekend. The ones who stayed found something with more depth than the Sonic name suggested — the gear shop, the trick timing, the constant arithmetic of when to spend.

Split-screen up to four players is where the sharp edges soften, because everyone is equally bad at it and the air gauge turns the last lap into a bluffing contest. Rough, stubborn, genuinely its own thing. Few racers have ever made running out of fuel this funny to watch.