It’s TrackMania on a DS, and it works brilliantly. The remaining 200 words or so are pretty much redundant now, but this game tends to get you excited. The most remarkable thing is how smoothly it runs: a flawless 60 frames a second that makes any caveats about the slightly pixellated visuals disappear in the wind. The zip in TrackMania’s distinctive drag racers, rally cars and 4x4s makes other DS racers look like golf buggies.

The structure remains unchanged: racing through a few rounds of the singleplayer tracks gives you enough Coppers (the in-game currency) to begin buying the fancier elements for the track editor, as well as further unlockable tracks. The 100-plus courses of singleplayer begin simply, before building up with a real flair for the fancy jumps and wall climbing that are TrackMania’s magic touch. Despite some streamlining of the types of courses – down to a racetrack, desert and off-road trinity – they manage to showcase almost all of the basic possibilities for level building.

The track editor is as robust as ever, and it’s easy to produce simple courses in a few minutes. There’s a slight element of fiddliness to the touchscreen at times, and although the memory capacity allows up to 60 tracks, it’s not possible to build gargantuan monsters. Like the absence of ghost data, however, it’s an entirely understandable omission in the context of TrackMania DS’s great technical achievement in translating the core of the series unblemished. For racing on DS, there’s nothing to compare, in either depth or style.

8/10