Speed Racer

Hitting another car is usually a mistake in a racing game. Here it is the point. The 2008 film tie-in builds its whole handling model around "car-fu" — the Mach 5 flicks sideways into a rival, barrel rolls over a wreck, slams an opponent into a barrier at full speed — and the result is a racer where contact earns you position instead of costing it.

That single idea carries more weight than it probably should. Courses are the loop-the-loop, gravity-optional fantasy tracks the Wachowskis put on screen, all candy colour and impossible banking, and the PS2 renders them flat and bright rather than detailed. The hardware was seven years old by then and it shows in the draw distance and the thin crowd of scenery. What survives is the sense of speed, which the game buys honestly through blur, a tight camera and a boost system that rewards aggression.

Sidhe handled the console versions, and their approach is unapologetically arcade: short races, a forgiving damage model, a jump button that exists mainly so you can land on someone. Learning when to deflect rather than barge is the real skill curve, and it is shallower than it first appears. Most races come down to surviving the opening scrum and then defending the lead with well-timed sideswipes, which gets repetitive across a full championship.

As a licensed product it does the unglamorous job well. The Mach 5's gadget jacks are present, the roster of rival drivers is drawn from the film, and nothing about the presentation condescends to the children it was clearly aimed at. The difficulty is calibrated low, the menus are plain, and there is split-screen for a second player, which was still a default courtesy in 2008 and is not one now.

It is a modest game with one genuinely good idea, released on a platform that was already being left behind. Nobody mistook it for Burnout. But the moment where you flip the Mach 5 sideways through the air and knock a leading car off a vertical wall is a thing almost no other racer lets you do, and it still raises a smile long after the film has faded.