TrackMania DS

And why might it not work? Well, despite the surprisingly successful transition, the DS does present limitations. Certain things do become conspicuous in their absence. Firstly, it doesn't record your ghost. Firebrand explains that it pretty much got this working, but it was proving too big for the cart size they were intending to use. Very recently the devs discovered they were going to get a larger cart after all, but it was too late to put the ghosts in. If there's a sequel, they'll be there, but not this time. Secondly, and most crucially, there's no internet play.

The local Wi-Fi games are promising. There's a range of modes: Hotseat (up to 8 players on one DS), single-cart play which offers a demo mode to scroungers of a few Stadium tracks, and then four multi-cart options. There's Championship mode, where you all attempt to score points, a Rounds mode, a limited-retries mode, and the standard TrackMania online game where everyone has a few minutes to put in their best time on a single track. All four cars appear on screen, and at this point in development seemed fairly solid.

But sadly, you have to be in the same room. Firebrand says this comes down to the limitations Nintendo puts on its WFC access, but it's definitely something they'd want to come back to if making a follow-up. Mario Kart manages it, so it seems to my simple brain that it should be possible. Of course, its absence means the regional competitive nature of the PC's TM is completely gone, with no online high-score tables and no central repository for user-made tracks.

Get near enough to someone with a copy, however, and you'll be able to share the tracks you've made. But, well, this seems like it might be a little underused.

I'm doing my best not to review the game here, but it's proving tricky. It's out in October, and Firebrand is still tweaking. But so far, my fears are disproven. The 3D manages to escape that awful, chunky blurring that spoils so many DS games. The draw distance genuinely bemused me, as I failed to spot anything popping up in the farthest backgrounds. The speed is spot on, and while the handling didn't quite feel as perfect as the PC's, there's time for that to change, and it seemed pretty damned good anyway. The physics are there, which even Firebrand didn't think it would manage. And best of all, they aren't planning to waste our time with touch-screen controls. A working prototype was developed for the engine, but as Firebrand boss Mark Greenshields delicately puts it, "If it's crap, it doesn't go in." You could always tell it was a gimmick, he explains, and there was no good reason to distract anyone from the superior button controls.

So, it's safe to prepare you to be excited about this one. Short of a grotesque act of madness in the next two months (the likes of which I can't imagine), Firebrand appears to have aced an astonishingly complex task. If anything, it could expand people's awareness of the capabilities of the little flip-top machine.