My DS is broken. Again. It’s going to have to be repaired for about the, ooh, fourth time now? (Not to mention the times I’ve had to have other DS Lites repaired.)

The broken part is the right trigger, which only responds about fifty percent of the time when you press it on the top of the trigger and almost never when you click the edge where my finger naturally rests.

The new Castlevania uses the right trigger a lot, so I couldn’t play that, but Trackmania only uses it in menus – and then not very often. So I played a lot of Trackmania over the weekend.

The good news is that it’s very fun, the bad news is that it’s not as perfect as I thought it was. On several occasions I’ve fallen through the track at the join between track pieces and the framerate, while mostly excellent, isn’t as perfect as I first thought.

I was doing a fairly hard race last night. The first time I was going to win, I fell off the track just before the finish line. The second time I met the target time exactly, to the hundredth of the second. The time shown at the top of the screen was in blue (which means you’ve won), but I wasn’t awarded the medal. The third time I was due to win, I did.

Not massively rubbish, but a bit annoying.

Well, based on a quick go, it’s exactly what I wanted. I’ve only done straight races (actually time trials, really) so far, but I can say that the controls and game engine are spot on. The framerate is perfect (so far) and the car controls as it should in a Trackmania game. I’ve got gold medals on the ten races in the Stadium and Desert environments at Practice level. They weren’t very difficult, but they took enough retries to make me wonder if I’m not going to have a problem with the game’s difficulty at higher levels.

Fingers crossed that it won’t get too hard. Right now that’s the only potential problem I’m seeing with the game.

It’s a very good racing game.

It’s a very good racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you.

It’s a very good FREE racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you.

It’s a very good FREE racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you… but it comes with Starforce copy protection.

Whether the Starforce thing is enough to put you off is up to you, but this is a very, very good game online and – as I said – it’s FREE. And I bumped into Ste from ugvm when I went online, which was nice.

HINT: Downloading it from Eurogamer was much, much faster than downloading from the official site, which is getting hit hard today.